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ADVENTURES IN COMMON SENSE 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

JUST HUMAN $i.oonet 

FOOTNOTES TO LIFE, $i.oonet 

WAR and WORLD 
GOVERNMENT . . . $i.oonet 

JOHN LANE COMPANY, NEW YORK 



ADVENTURES 

IN COMMON SENSE 

By dr. frank CRANE ■ 

Author of "Just Human," 

"Footnotes to Life," 

"War and World Government,"Etc. 



NEW YORK /. /. JOHN LANE COMPANY 
MCMXVI /. ,-. /. /. ,-. .-. .-. .*. /. 



4 



0<^' A^ > ^ 



Copyright, 1916, 
By JOHN LANE COMPANY 



V 




Press of 

J. J. Little & Ives Company 

New York, U. S. A. 



APR 



3 1916 



^Cl,A427671 '■;^,v 



TO 

JOHN H. PATTERSON 
OF DAYTON 

THIS BOOK IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED 
IN EECOGNITION OF A HELPFUL FRIENDSHIP 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

By Way of Introduction I Tell My Own Adven- 
ture EST Common Sense 13 

The Smile of La Joconde 22 

A Recipe for Happiness 26 

The Secret of Permanent Pleasure ... 29 

Spanking Father . 33 

Things 36 

The Horror of Jewels 39 

In Paris 42 

Flapdoodle 45 

Strange! 48 

What's the Matter With Art? 51 

The American Penal System 53 

In Praise of Laziness 56 

The Ladies' Card Game 59 

Love and Wisdom 61 

The Sick Room 64 

Up Against It 67 

The Kitchen 70 

Superfluous Energy 73 

Why Was I Born? 76 

The Outpopulating Power 79 

Intelligent Optimism 82 

The Scrap Pile 85 

Aischrolatreia 88 

7 



PAGE 

The Mirth Cure 91 

Discarded Things 95 

The Baptism 98 

The Cry oe the Weary loi 

The Friend 104 

The Stairway 107 

The Cage 109 

The Blessing 112 

The City and Privacy 115 

A Wealthy Man 118 

The Fireplace 121 

The Sand Pile 124 

Music . 127 

No Need op Charm 130 

The Practice of Greatness by Words . . . 132 

What We Can Never Know 135 

"And No One Shall Work For Money" . . 138 

The School Yard 141 

The Curse of Poverty 144 

What is Best? 147 

A Christmas Card . 150 

What is a Woman to Do? 152 

Should Girls Pay? 155 

Over and Over Forever 158 

A Successful Woman 161 

Fried Chicken 164 

Learn Thanksgiving from the Have-nots . . 167 

George Washington, Gentleman 170 

Freedom and Knowledge for Women . . . 174 

The Written Examination 177 

There Are Others 180 

Real Greatness 183 

8 



PAGE 

Happy Drugs . i86 

The Unfrocked 189 

Meaning op the Woman Movement . . . . 191 

Theory and Practice in Bringing Up Children 194 

Unnoted Heroism 197 

Housework 200 

Fear Kills Talk 203 

Lincoln, Democrat, Servant of All'. . , . 206 

A $5,000 Flea 209 

Shall She Tell Him? . 212 

The Undying Credulities 215 

The Unbeliever 218 

When the World Woke Up 221 

The Unknown Future 224 

The New Nobility 227 

Word Pictures 230 

Dancing 233 

The Pond of Vanoise 235 

A Wonderful Sinner 237 

Mandrakes and Modernism 240 

New Year's Resolutions 244 

An Open Letter to Santa Claus .... 247 

Shakespeare 250 

The Anonymous Letter 252 

Golden Rod 254 



9 



ADVENTURES IN COMMON SENSE 



BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION I TELL MY 
OWN ADVENTURE IN COMMON SENSE 

In 1909 I was pastor of the Union Congre- 
gational Church at Worcester, Massachusetts. 

It was a strong Church. My relations with 
the people were delightful. My salary was good, 
as preachers' salaries go. I was practically set- 
tled for life, as a New England Church rarely 
dismisses its pastor. 

In the midst of this comfortable career I sud- 
denly resigned. For these reasons: 

My position was too secure. It was not pre- 
carious enough. Unless one is a bit uncertain 
where his daily bread is coming from he lacks 
the atmosphere of hazard necessary if one is to 
keep young. I was drifting into the horrible 
stagnation of the endowed class. I was forty- 
eight. I wanted to get out into the arena and 
wrestle with men, else I felt that my mental and 
spiritual muscles would stiffen. I longed to hunt 
for work, and was tired of having employment 
assured me. 

In other words I wanted Adventure. I wanted 
the Open Road, and was tired of the House. 

There was no friction with my people. I loved 
13 



them and they gave every indication of liking me. 

I had no theological or credal difficulties. My 
church allowed me entire intellectual freedom; 
in fact, they were as progressive and independent 
in thought as I. 

And there was a deeper reason for my stepping 
out of a regular pulpit. No matter how excellent 
a congregation may be, it is limited; the very 
word "Church" means "called out," and implies 
exclusiveness. But in me there had grown a 
passion for the multitude. I realized that my 
Maker had intended me for an Outsider. All 
the while that I sat in my study or stood in my 
pulpit I was yearning for the great, unherded 
mass of men and women who never came to my 
Church, many of them to no Church at all. 
Those were my people. My message was to 
them, not to the elect. 

I do not want to be taken as criticizing the 
Church. I am persuaded it is the best place for 
most preachers to work. All I say is that my 
feeling forced me out into the highway and mar- 
ket. 

It took me forty-eight years to come to my- 
self, but finally I found out where I belonged. 

So I said to my wife : "I want to quit. I want 
to get out and play with the boys in the alley. 
Above all I want to write for the Newspapers. 
Of course, preaching is all I know, but I believe 
the best place to preach is in the columns of the 
daily press. Jesus was not in the Temple; He 

14 



was by the roadside; He went down to where 
humanity was and talked there. I want to try 
that once before I die. 

"Our children are now grown up and through 
school. We are foot-loose. Let us take to the 
open, and see what happens." 

The idea appealed to her. I resigned. I had 
no money. Preachers rarely save money. So I 
borrowed $i,6oo on my life insurance, and we 
began our wanderings by going by water to Chi- 
cago, up the Hudson, down the St. Lawrence, 
and through the Great Lakes. 

I began to infest the Chicago Newspapers. I 
found out that while I desired to write for the 
newspapers I was quite alone in my desire. The 
editors laughed at me. "Why," they said, "we 
can get preaching stuff by the yard — for nothing. 
Nobody reads it. We want news." 

I argued with them. "You are mistaken. Hu- 
man nature is the same as it has always been, 
and people have always liked to be preached to. 
The only trouble is that nobody has offered 
preaching of the right kind to the newspapers. 
Mine is the right kind. Try it." 

At last Leigh Reilly, then editor of the Chi- 
cago Evening Post, fell. He accepted my pro- 
posal to run a stickful or two on his editorial 
page, under the title, "The Philosopher's Cor- 
ner." For this I received one dollar a day, but 
that was nothing compared to the immense bliss 
and rapture I received from seeing my pet notion 

15 



exploited at last. I never expect to be as happy 
again as I was at seeing my name in the Post. 

It is pleasant to feel the response of an audi- 
ence to the spoken word, and this is the spiritual 
reward of the public speaker. But I now tasted 
the delight of seeing my writing in print, and the 
joy of it was more than that of the orator. 

About six months I lasted on the Post, at that 
time the high-brow paper of Chicago. Then the 
owner fired me, fearing probably that there must 
be something shady about any man that had quit 
preaching. An ex-preacher is a suspicious char- 
acter, I discovered. The average mind reasons: 
"There must have been something wrong or he 
would not have left the pulpit." If he left a 
good salary also, the suspicion hardens to a cer- 
tainty. I suppose that the proprietor feared that 
if I should suddenly get drunk, or run off with my 
neighbor's wife, or do some other ex-ministerial 
high-jinks, the elegant and refined readers of the 
Post would be down on him for carrying my name 
on his pages. 

Anyway, I was gently dismissed, though Reilly 
assured me that he, and all the boys around the 
office, liked the stuff. 

Meanwhile, however, I had received a letter 
from Edward Bok, of the Ladies' Home Journal, 
enclosing a clipping from my Philosopher's Cor- 
ner in the Post, and asking me whether I did that 
just once, by accident, or whether I could do it 
again, and regularly. I sat down and wrote him 

i6 



twenty little articles of the kind he had noticed, 
and sent them to him and said that the best way 
to answer his question was to submit specimens. 

For the benefit of struggling young authors, 
seeking for the key to success, I may state a curi- 
ous element of this correspondence. Each of my 
twenty articles was on a separate sheet. Some of 
the sheets were pink and some white. Mr. Bok 
accepted all those that were pink. This ranks 
about on a par with most hints to aspiring 
authors. 

Mr. Bok ran a page of my matter for several 
months. I had also broken into the Chicago Trib- 
une, and George Matthew Adams was using a 
daily brief article in his syndicate. The Hearst 
papers were buying some at my counter. 

I was now feeling so rich that I went to Europe 
and spent a year or so living in Rome, Paris and 
London, talking with common folks and learning 
their philosophy. 

The syndicate of The Associated Newspapers 
was formed about this time, consisting of some 
forty newspapers throughout the United States 
and Canada, and I became a writer for them, a 
position I yet hold. 

My experiment has succeeded. I will tell 
why. 

At first I asked a literary friend to write this 
introduction. He replied, "I will do so with 
pleasure. But why don't you do it yourself? 
What I would write would be only the usual ap- 

17 



preclatlon of one author by another, and would 
interest readers but sHghtly. Tell your story 
yourself and people will read it. You know more 
about yourself than any one else knows." 

Hence this blurb. 

Why have I succeeded in getting people to read 
my articles and inducing newspapers to pay for 
them? 

My opinion has changed. It now seems to me 
that it is not so much the Sermon people want, 
as it is the Essay. 

The Essay had finally achieved the distinction 
of being praised by all and read by none. It had 
become a highly developed literary ornament. A 
few persons in Boston, and a few Brahmans else- 
where, read Essays. The vast commons, never. 

The first thing I did to the Essay was to make 
it short. I perceived that the average Intelligence 
wanted one point, not a dozen. A man will seize 
one idea and devour It with relish; overload his 
plate and you kill his appetite. 

People like Ideas, but they like them a la carte 
and not table d'hote. 

The old-fashioned Essay was a conglomerate 
of many Ideas. JVer zu viel will geht oft leer aus. 

I took one point, sharpened it and drove It 
home. I resisted the ecclesiastical temptation to 
firstly and tenthly. As a result, the reader, first 
seeing that it wasn't very long, tackled it. He 
remembered it. He was tempted to cut it out and 
carry it in his pocketbook. 

1 8 



Second, I realized that the most Interesting 
things In the world are the old things and the 
common things. Hence I did not strain after the 
outlandish and the unusual, In the selection of 
themes, but went Into the living-room, bed-room 
and kitchen of the human heart, and spoke of 
what I saw there. I tried to tell the housewife 
what a wonderful thing her work-basket Is, and 
how It is related to the spheres and to her ever- 
lasting soul; to show the cook the divine relation 
of dishwashing to life; to make the business man 
see the River of God running through his office; 
and to reveal to the shop girl that her tears and 
laughter are just as real and as rich In human 
quality as the emotions of duchesses and famous 
actresses. 

I found among the undistinguished and the un- 
elect a mine of human gold. 

Furthermore I did not take my wares to the 
kings and nobles of literature, to the stately Quar- 
terlies and other magazines that give tone to the 
library table but lie uncut and unread. Having 
stuff for the millions I went with It to the news- 
papers, which the millions read. Having a pas- 
sion for democracy I took the greatest of all 
democratic vehicles, the newspaper, which Is read 
by millionaire and hobo, fat and rich gentlemen 
and lean and hungry, fine ladies and servant girls, 
read by the President and by the peddler. 

I found that the same ideas that are preached 
from pulpits to the chosen few, and lectured on by 

19 



professors to select classes, and favored by intel- 
lectuals generally, are equally welcomed by com- 
mon folks, only they want it unaffected and dis- 
infected. They, too, love problems of conscience 
and conduct, of God and destiny, of love and mys- 
tery. They do not, however, care for literary 
posing, for the antics of conventional culture, nor 
for the conceit of technical phraseology. 

Hence I once for all renounced all ambition 
toward fine writing. I tried to say my say in the 
clearest, fewest words possible. I went straight 
at my point and quit when I had got done. 

I found out that when one writes simply and 
only to be understood, in entire disregard of rules 
of art, without stumbling over his medium, one 
writes entertainingly. 

I have taken the dead Essay and made it a 
living thing. I have taken the Essay out of its 
glass coffin in the library and put it on the office 
desk, on the woman's work-table, and in the la- 
borer's pocket. 

, This I have done without using the ready-made 
platform of the preacher, the prestige of a famous 
name, the antics of the mountebank or the salac- 
ity of the border-bands of literature. 

My name meant nothing to readers. What I 
said was read for its own sake. 

To sum up, my conviction was and is that the 
Short Idea, or Essay, can be made as interesting 
as the Short Story. This I did, because I believed 
it; this I believe, because I did it. 

20 



I do not know whether these Essays are good 
literature or not. Only to-day they are asked for, 
paid for and read. To-morrow the critics will 
tell you why. Also they will tell you why they 
should not have succeeded. 

All I do here Is to tell you why and how they 
were written. I ought to know, for I wrote them 
myself. 

At any rate, here Is a bookful of them, and the 
gentle reader may judge for himself. 

Frank Crane 



21 



THE SMILE OF LA JOCONDE 

When Leonardo's Mona Lisa finally got back 
to her place upon the walls of the Louvre all the 
world came to see her — at least on the first day 
of her home-coming some twenty thousand 
trooped by to have a look at the most famous of 
paintings. 

And there, with those placid hands upon her 
lap, she sat in her frame, regarding the passers- 
by with her amused and superior smile, very much 
as you would look upon the antics of your pet 
kitten. 

"Why worry?" she seemed to say. "Here I 
am, as you see. I came back, of course, since it Is 
written. It was destiny. All of us but follow our 
programme. I am the original predestinarian. 
I am the cheerful fatalist. Men and women 
struggle and fume, but always by and by they do 
what is set down for them to do, in the book of 
fate. It is to smile ! 

"I am the companion of Omar Khayyam. For 
I am the Looker-On. I do not mingle with the 
energies of men. I am the Bystander. 

"My Maker was the Many-Minded One. He 
was a Philosopher. Philosophy is aloofness. I 

22 



am the daughter of the Aloof, Leonardo smiled 
at men In his heart, and made me that I might 
smile at them forever. 

"I am the Eternal Feminine. I do not labor. 
I sit. I judge. I smile. 

"I know, hence I am amused. I am in the se- 
cret of things, and that is always rather funny ; it 
is so different from the appearance of things. 

"In the core of wisdom is laughter. In the se- 
cret springs of history there is grim humor. 
Underneath the intense activities, the fierce rival- 
ries, the burning passions of men, back of the de- 
bates of senates, the thunder of wars, the display 
of wealth, and the earnestness of reformers, there 
is something that makes me smile. I cannot tell 
you what It Is. You would have to be a Leonardo 
to understand. 

"Wisdom is Jocund as it nears Perfection. 
God is Glad. 

"This at least I can hint to you. You are fret- 
ting over nothing at all. The universe is Kind. 
It means well by man. When you get through 
with life, and pass through revealing death, and 
see what It all means, the first thing you will do 
will be to have a good laugh. 

"Tragedy is the greatest of humbugs. I have 
peeped behind the veil. I know that every Jack 
will have his Jill, every wrong be righted, and the 
Short Story called Life will have a happy ending. 

"I have seen the end of the world. It is pleas- 
ant. That is why all through the Revolution and 

23 



/ 
Tyranny, the flow and ebb of progress, Louis the/ 
Luxurious, and Robespierre the Terrible, I hav6 
sat so contented and unruffled. 

"I smiled to see how long it took men to dis- 
cover Gravitation, Steam, Electricity, Evolution, 
Democracy. The race is so stupid, so awkward, 
and amusing. 

"I am Nature. Look at me and you see how 
self-satisfied and smiling Nature goes about her 
business. 

"I am Mankind, playing, procreating, joking, 
planting trees, building houses, and going away. 

"I am Death, which is the most delightful sur- 
prise, and not at all the horrible catastrophe you 
fancy. 

"I am Everything and Everybody. Some 
things and some people are morbid and vicious, 
but, in the All, cheer predominates. 

"I am in the Secret of God, and the Secret of 
God is — a smile. 

"Men take themselves so seriously. They 
think they do things. In reality they are leaves 
upon the streams, clouds in the sky, motes in the 
sunbeam. They are but chess-men. He who 
moves is God, who smiles. 

"I am the Soul of kittens that play with their 
tails, of puppies that frisk, of little lambs that 
gambol, of all things newborn. I am Youth for- 
ever recurrent. 

"If I could speak I should utter the greatest 
words ever spoken, and recall to you that the 

24 



world's Master said : *I am the Resurrection and 
the Life.' " 

It is said that the crowd that viewed Mona Lisa 
that day were of "a light gayety, with a decided 
tendency to crack jokes." Even the police guard- 
ing her were smiling. 

The incomparable Leonardo, full of strange 
and cunning secrets, embodied his whole wisdom 
in a Smile, that it might infect the world. 



25 



A RECIPE FOR HAPPINESS 

It is worth while to try any recipe for happi- 
ness. 

Here is one that at least is to be commended 
for its simplicity and for the fact that it is within 
the reach of all. 

It is to rid yourself of your notion of your 
Rights. 

Think a bit, and you will see that the greater 
part of all the indignities, chagrins, and humilia- 
tions you have had to endure arise from certain 
ideas you entertain about what is Due you. 

If you can knead your mind about until you 
come to the conclusion that Nothing At All 
is due you, happiness is pretty sure to come in and 
take permanent lodgings in your heart. 

Most of us have a contempt for manipulating 
our minds to suit the inevitable, and an admira- 
tion for those of us who can coerce events to suit 
their desires. 

But, for instance, suppose, when you awake in 
the morning, before you get out of bed to do your 
gymnastics, you do a little mental exercise. Ask 
yourself: "Why should any one love me? Why 
should I be sought, admired, or praised? What 

26 



right have I to health or wealth? Others suffer, 
why should I be happy? I have no claims on the 
universe, so if anything good comes my way to- 
day I shall consider myself in luck." 

Before you get up clean out of your mind every 
feeling of your Rights, and see what kind of a 
day you will have. 

Don't try for more than one day, at first, for 
it will tax your forces. 

Old habits of thought will bring constant sug- 
gestions, that you are being abused, imposed 
upon, oppressed and devoured. Be patient. Put 
these ideas away. Try, just one day, to act on the 
theory that you have no rights at all. 

Expect no gratitude when you help the poor. 
Look for no recognition when you accommodate 
a friend. Give up your seat in the crowded car. 
Step back and wait for others at the theatre box 
office. Require no attention from your servants, 
your children, or your wife. Be a door-mat — it's 
only for one day. 

By night you may be disgusted with the experi- 
ment. 

And yet, reflect ! Have not all the best things 
in life come to you over your shoulder, and have 
not the great, miseries of your life been due to 
not getting things you thought you ought to have, 
things you strived for? 

Remember the simple and lively emotions 
caused by the unexpected stroke of luck, by the 
favor of some one from whom you did not look 

27 



for it, by the love shown you that you did not 
dream of, by beautiful sights, pleasant odors, de- 
lightful foods, as well as other surprises of sym- 
pathy, regard, and appreciation that fell to you as 
bolts from a clear sky. 

The best of our treasures came to us unde- 
served. 

The joys that know no yesterdays are all sur- 
plus. We never earned them. 

Health is nature's largess. 

True love is the Gift of an overbrimming 
heart. The man who thinks he Deserves the 
love of a good woman, and the worship of little 
children, ought to be kicked. 

In its higher plane, life is not commercial; it Is 
not buying for a price; it is not a realm of law, 
except the mystic law of love. Thank God! we 
do Not get our just deserts. 

To get the taste of life we must approach It as 
a beggar at the king's court. If we are despised, 
what more natural? If we are feasted, what a 
marvel ? 

Rather, let us say that none of us can get the 
rich, sweet flavor of life unless he has the spirit in 
him of a little child. 

Verily, verily, he that cannot be changed and 
become as a little child shall never know at all 
how good a thing It is to live. 



28 



THE SECRET OF PERMANENT 
PLEASURE 

How can I get the most out of life? 

How can I keep from having that sense of dis- 
satisfaction from coming to bed with me of 
nights? 

How can I have, for my visitor at the close of 
day, that feeling of content, that the gone twenty- 
four hours were worth while? 

Tell me that. Tell me a cure for my disgust 
of self, for that ash-taste of self-consciousness, 
for that irritation in reflection, for that perpetual 
turning to to-morrow in order to drown the bit- 
terness of to-day, as a fool turns to his cups to 
forget his life-weariness. 

Well, this hint may help: The Secret of 
Permanent Pleasure Lies in Cultivating 
Ever Higher Forms of Pleasure. 

The savage eats raw flesh, the civilized man 
wants it cooked, the more civilized man likes it 
well cooked. 

The value of culture is the refinement of wants. 

In a dumb, silly way the world perceives this, 
and tries to show superiority in forms of pleasure 
that are unusual, expensive, and exclusive. It 

29 



dines at tawdry hotels, wears costly jewels, preens 
itself in fine clothes and wraps itself in rich furs. 

This is the twisted, perverted notion of what 
is a great truth. 

All luxury and extravagance soon become 
coarse and degrading to real souls. The Upper 
Ten get around to the crassness of life of the 
Submerged Tenth. 

They are victims of the Great Delusion. 

The Great Delusion is that it is Complexity that 
Indicates higher life; whereas it is Simplicity, de- 
veloping into ever greater Fineness (Refinement). 

The roads to more permanent pleasures are 
these: Religion, Philosophy, Love, Art, Crafts- 
manship and Nature, 

By Religion I mean a reverent habit of mind, a 
sense of wonder and mystery, a realization that 
we live in a world of spiritual meanings. Unless 
you can attain to this your life must always be 
mean and hard. Of course, I refer to no religious 
institution, but to that religious feeling that has 
always marked great lives. 

By Philosophy I mean that you must have some 
sort of programme for your life. So long as 
events to you are but a disordered mess of "hap- 
penings" you will be miserable; the football of 
fate. You must have certain foundation princi- 
ples, some settled theory of life that will bring 
order out of chaos. 

By Love I mean that you must have the power 
to idealize your crude instincts. Lust sates, sick- 

30 



ens, wearies. Love, which Is the idealization of 
passion, is eternal, ever fresh. 

By Art I mean the expression of the higher 
powers of the mind in creating beautiful things. 
When you learn to love a Greek Temple more 
than the gingerbread house of a New York mil- 
lionaire, a painting by Israels or Millet more than 
a chromo, the wit of Charles Lamb more than that 
of Joe Miller, the charm of Michelangelo's 
"Moses" more than the huge parlor-clock monu- 
ments in some of our parks, a Beethoven quartet 
more than cabaret music, a story by Hawthorne 
more than one of the modern sex-soaked or ad- 
venture-choked romances, such a play as Barrie's 
"The Admirable Crichton" more than a cheap 
and loud melodrama, and, in general, all things 
that have the quietness of power, the self-restraint 
of genius and the subtlety of intellectual vision, 
then you have come considerably toward the point 
where your Pleasures Are More Permanent 
and have less nauseating dregs. 

By Craftsmanship I mean that skill that trans- 
forms work from drudgery to enchantment. 

And by the love of Nature I mean that patient 
study of, and eventual delight in, the marvellous 
design, perfection and handicraft exhibited by 
everything that grows, by everything the Creator 
has made. 

The Secret of Permanent Pleasure will 
be found by any one who will make it his life 

31 



business to seek his satisfaction in these six 
sources. 

Thus you may come to that rational Delight 
IN Your Own Thoughts, such as Robert 
Bridges, the new laureate of England, expresses : 

"My thoughts swim like a ship, that with the weight 
Of her rich burden sleeps on the infinite seas 
Becalm'd and cannot stir her golden freight." 



SPANKING FATHER 

The country was agitated some days ago by 
the news of a gentleman from Indiana, a preacher, 
too, who had deemed it needful to spank his pa. 

Although I have enrolled my name on the list 
of them who do not believe in spanking children, 
and have thereto set down many and cogent argu- 
ments, I do not wish to be taken as being opposed 
to spanking per se. 

Spanking is a most wholesome and health-giv- 
ing exercise, and is not without its mental and 
moral advantageous by-products. 

Fathers often need it, and they are fortunate 
if they have sons husky enough to give them 
what they are suffering for. 

Why, also, when innumerable children are be- 
ing daily pounded a posteriori and nobody seems 
to think it's anybody's business to interfere, 
should all this hullabaloo arise when one child 
proceeds to turn the tables and castigate dad a 
bit? What are we coming to? Where is our 
personal liberty? Where the inviolability of 
family secrets? What next? 

There are a lot of people who need spanking. 
Let me call a few to your mind. 

33 



There is the college youth putting in his nights 
and days in acquiring a set of ruinous habits and 
cultivating an assortment of snob notions, when 
he ought to be trying to learn something in re- 
turn for the money his parents are advancing. He 
is going to be a gilded social bonehead, simply 
because there Is no proper official to turn him over 
the knee and whale some sense into him. 

There is the down-and-outer, the man who 
thinks the world is against him, who can't try 
again, and who believes there is nothing now left 
for him but to go out into the garden and eat 
worms. There's no use talking to him. The 
only remedy for his case Is a tough hickory lath 
and a strong right arm. 

There are the women who are so sorry for 
themselves, who have every disease they hear of, 
whose complaining whine is as the unceasing No- 
vember rain upon the window. Of course we 
would not strike a woman; there ought to be a 
spanking machine. 

Indeed, there Is the whole army of self-pity; 
the weepers who rule their husbands by "the tyr- 
anny of tears"; the naggers, human mosquitoes, 
and "the female of the species is more deadly 
than the male"; the drunken loafers who "can't" 
quit making beasts of themselves; the gentlemen 
content to let their wives earn the living; the 
dudes and mashers who infest pubhc ways, whose 
eyes Insult every decent woman passing; the lacka- 
daisical daughters who lounge about reading nov- 

34 



els or manicuring their nails while mother washes 
the dishes ; the egoist perky as a bantam rooster, 
and as pin-headed; and the whole dawdling set of 
idlers, who never dream of doing any of the 
world's work, are content to amuse themselves 
spending money other people have earned, and 
who, strange to say, look upon themselves as the 
superior class. 

These to the shingle and the slipper! Let us 
have no "cruel and unusual" punishment, not the 
boot nor the wheel nor the Maiden of Nurem- 
berg! No. Turn them gently up, and with the 
hairbrush or other handy instrument, and upon 
the place the Creator especially designed for cor- 
rection unto the soul's health — soak 'em! 

The question may arise. Who is going to de- 
cide which individuals are to be spanked? The 
answer is simple. If no one has any other nomi- 
nation to offer, I will decide. 



35. 



THINGS 

Miss Mathilda Tommet of Milwaukee left 
a will the other day eight and one-half feet long, 
written in her own hand on sheets of paper pasted 
together. In it she bequeathed to one relative 
"my best bedspread and one-half of my best tow- 
els" ; to another a high-backed chair, admonishing 
her executors to "be sure to take the one standing 
on the north side of the sideboard" ; to another 
her chickens and feed; while vegetables, fruit, 
pickles, a pail of lard, and "father's old clock" 
go to another, and to her dearest enemy a pair of 
old shoestrings. 

Then there was Thoreau, who in his house by 
Walden Pond would have no furniture; he found 
a stone once which he fancied, and kept awhile, 
but soon threw it away, as he found it had to be 
dusted. 

One of the greatest tyrannies of life is 
Things. 

The most common form ;of insanity is the 
mania to Own. 

One of the first acts of a person who comes into 
money is to load himself down with a pile of 
rubbish that makes his life a fret and his death- 
bed terrible. 

36 



The very rich collect. They get together 
spoons, canes, pictures, vases, pitchers, books, or 
marbles. When there is no more room for them 
in the house they build a wing and pack it full. 

I knew a man who had $20,000 worth of old 
postage stamps locked up in a safety deposit 
vault. 

I knew an old woman who never travelled, 
although she longed to travel and had plenty of 
means, because she was afraid her parlor carpet 
and her blue china dishes would not properly be 
taken care of. 

The stores are heaped up with Things. The 
most skilful men are employed to persuade people 
to buy Things for which they have no earthly 
use. 

Every home contains sets of books that were 
bought at a high rate, and that have stood for 
years without a soul looking into them. 

American living rooms are as cluttered as 
Westminster Abbey. Every mantel is loaded with 
junk. The walls are covered with pictures, most 
of them bad. The floors are so thick with chairs 
and superfluous stands and tables that few can 
wind their way through them by day and none by 
night. 

Things, things, things! Bedrooms are full of 
them, closets heaped with them, the attic is choked 
with them, the woodshed and barn are running 
over. 

When we go away on vacations we take trunks 

37 



full of things. When we go to Europe also we 
find that baggage is the plague of our life. 

It is a relief to turn to the books of the Hindus 
and read: 

"Even if they have longer remained with us, 
the objects of sense are sure to vanish. Why, 
then, not forsake them ourselves? If they pass 
away by themselves they cause the greatest pain 
to the mind, but if we forsake them ourselves they 
cause endless happiness and peace." 

And in another Oriental book we find this 
searching word: 

"For a man's life consisteth not in the abun- 
dance of Things which he possesseth." 



38 



THE HORROR OF JEWELS 

You have read de Maupassant's story "The 
Diamond Necklace"? It tells of a poor and 
beautiful young wife who borrowed of a rich 
friend whom she had known In her school days a 
string of diamonds to wear to a ball. She lost 
the trinket. Her husband borrowed a great sum 
of money, had the necklace duplicated by a jewel- 
ler, and gave It to the rich woman, to avoid the 
charge of theft. The poor couple worked years 
to pay off the debt. The wretched woman, re- 
duced to drudgery, lost all her beauty; became 
wrinkled, bent, old before her time. One day she 
met by chance her wealthy friend. They spoke 
of the necklace. The poor woman told the truth 
about her experience. The rich woman said It 
was too bad — for the necklace was but paste. 

The tale Is an artistic expression of what might 
be called The Horror of Jewels. 

Almost every precious stone of great value, al- 
most every $20,000 rope of pearls, or $1,000 
solitaire diamond, or extraordinary ruby, has a 
history that runs to the accompaniment of vanity, 
envy, lust, theft, hate, and murder. Not one has 
produced any speck of real love or pure peace 
of mind. 

39 



The Devil probably wears a million-dollar dia- 
mond ring. And his wife jewels running into the 
billions. They ought to. 

The desire to own, wear, or collect gems of 
fabulous value is akin to the lowest cravings of 
which human beings are capable. It is an adver- 
tisement of offensive pride. It is provocative of 
unhappiness. 

Precious gems are the seeds of those passions 
that destroy content. 

To display them marks a certain lack of good 
breeding, of that gentleness that makes a gentle- 
man. 

They are the crystallized sap of the vicious in- 
equity of privilege. 

If one has money the worst form in which he 
can invest it is in the parade of gems. 

The queer part of it is that you never can tell. 
Once we could distinguish real pearls from imita- 
tion by the person who wore them: if it was a 
lady with an income of fifty thousand a year they 
were genuine; if she was a working woman they 
were false. Nowadays the wealthy classes lock 
their real jewels in safety deposit vaults and wear 
imitation. They can arouse all the detestable 
emotions desired by wearing the false jewels, and 
run no risk of losing the real. The paste jewel 
holds the same "legal tender" relation socially to 
the true jewel that the ten-dollar bill holds com- 
mercially to the gold eagle. 

Expensive jewels are of value to the rich as a 
40 



quick means of squandering their money and 
creating misery. "To us," says Gustave Tery, 
"there is no difference between a necklace costing 
a million francs and one costing three francs ; but 
to the rich the difference is very real, since it 
comes, if I calculate correctly, to nine hundred 
and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety- 
seven francs. Which is not to be sneezed at." 



41 



IN PARIS 

She was one of the most charming and well 
known artistes of the Theatre Frangais. The 
other morning at an early hour she called a taxi 
to go to the railway station. She was to visit a 
sick friend in a near-by town. On arriving at the 
station she opened her handbag. Horrors I She 
found therein a handkerchief, some keys, a small 
mirror, and a powder box — ^but no money. She 
had forgotten her purse. 

And the train was due to leave in ten minutes. 

She got out of the taxi more frightened than 
she had ever been upon the stage, and addressed 
the chauffeur: 

"Monsieur," she said, "something absurd has 
happened me, something desolating. I have left 
my pocketbook at home. I have no money to buy 
my railway ticket, no money to pay your fare." 

The chauffeur smiled. The lady thereupon 
smiled also, an embarrassed smile, though she 
had a strong impulse to cry. 

"If I dared. Monsieur," she said tremblingly, 
"I would ask you for a little money, instead of 
giving you some." 

The chauffeur put his hand in his pocket. 
42 



"How much do you need, Madame?" 

He had taken his purse from the pocket of his 
coat and was holding it politely in his hand. 

The artiste, abashed, said: 

"Oh, Monsieur, with fifty francs I " 

"Here you are, Madame!" 

He handed her a fifty-franc note, which she 
took. At the same time she gave him her card, 
upon which she had written something. 

"Here is my address," she said. "My husband 
will pay you. But — in the meanwhile — ^would 
you — may I offer you " 

She made a motion to remove her diamond 
ring. The chauffeur, with the manner of a gentle- 
man, gave a gesture of protest. 

"Oh ! I pray you, Madame !" he said. "The 
card is quite enough." 

She thanked him. She was furious, yet 
charmed. As she insisted in her very nicest words 
that he go get himself paid at once, he replied, 
with a shrug: 

"Oh, yes, Madame, this evening, perhaps, or 
to-morrow, or next day. It doesn't matter in the 
least." 

He smiled again, raised his cap, and, mounting 
his machine, disappeared. 

No, this did not happen In New York, nor Chi- 
cago. I said Paris. 

I think I read somewhere In Thackeray his ac- 
count of a certain tailor in the Rue Something-or- 
other whom he owed a long-standing bill, and 

43 



who, when Thackeray came to see him and apolo- 
gized for not paying, not only expressed deep 
sympathy with his customer's embarrassment but 
even offered to lend him money. Such things do 
happen — in Paris. 



44 



FLAPDOODLE 

"The food on which fools are fed," says the 
Standard Dictionary. 

In common use the term is the favorite one of 
cynics to characterize any sort of exuberance. 

They also love the words "twaddle," "non- 
sense," "gush," and "balderdash." 

The word cynic has the root-meaning of dog. 
It is a slander on the dog. The dog is the most 
sentimental animal known. He has a fit of ec- 
static joy at even a glance from you. 

When the lover makes a sonnet upon his mis- 
tress's eyebrow, it is Flapdoodle, to the cynic. 

Read over your last letter, young lady, where 
he says your brow is like the snowdrift and your 
neck is like the swan, and your face it is the fairest 
that e'er the sun shone on. Flapdoodle! 

Coo to your baby, little mother, and speak 
your infantile dialect, and ask him, "Does ums 
want to come to ums muzzers?" Flapdoodle! 

Preach to the crowd gathered in the slums, O 
Salvation Army Lassie ! Put tears in your voice, 
and make the spiritual appeal a red-hot heart 
force; bring the drunkard to sobriety and the 
smirched woman to repentance and a new life. 
Flapdoodle ! 

45 



Plead for the cause of man, O social dreamer! 
Seek to put business upon a base of absolute jus- 
tice, and to get for every human being equality of 
opportunity. Impractical ! Flapdoodle ! 

Strive to abolish the accursed error of punish- 
ment, with its inhuman prisons and gallows trees, 
and substitute the organized prevention of crime 
and the scientific healing of the criminal. Flap- 
doodle ! 

Plead for the right of all children to play, to 
be duly equipped for life, and to be kept out of 
economic struggle by the mothering state. Flap- 
doodle ! 

Speak for the right of every woman to the full 
privilege of a human being. Flapdoodle ! 

Declare, O President of the United States, for 
the better way of self-restraint and patience, and 
against the medieval monstrosity of war, in deal- 
ing with a neighbor state. Flapdoodle! 

Work, Mr. Lloyd George, for the protection 
of mothers, the alleviation of poverty, reforms in 
land holding, and the curbing of age-old privi- 
lege. All the Wise Ones cry out Flapdoodle! 

Write, O Newspaper Man, not with dull pros- 
ing, but with the fire of conviction, words that 
throb like hearts alive. Flapdoodle! 

So say the Critics, the Experienced, the Old- 
Hearted, the Sophisticated, the Burnt Out, from 
all whom the good God deliver us! 

Give us, rather, the wonder of youth, the rap- 
ture of lovers, the gush of the enthusiastic, those 

46 



that yet can weep over a book and wipe their eyes 
at a play, women who cuddle babies and are fool- 
ish over their husbands, men who can yell at a 
ball game and whoop at a political meeting, poets 
who still hear Pan's pipings, and patriots whose 
throats choke at the sight of their country's flag. 
Thanks be ! there are yet a thousand Fans, Sob 
Sisters, Giggling Girls, and Lovesick Swains to 
one Cynic! We wish him no harm, but one of 
him is a crowd. 



47 



STRANGE! 

"What fools these mortals be I" said Puck. 

And we are inclined to agree with him when 
we observe : 

That men toil their life long to lay up money 
for their children, when the worst calamity that 
can befall a youth is to be relieved from the need 
to work for a living; 

That a man's pride and aim seems to be to 
keep his wife in idleness and luxury, and he con- 
siders himself disgraced if she engages in useful 
work, when the greatest foe to female virtue is 
idleness ; 

That all our greatness comes from struggle and 
danger, while we devote our lives to avoiding 
these things; 

That the only faith that is worth anything Is 
the product of wrestling with doubts, yet doubts 
we consider to be irreligious; 

That all the world is convinced of the waste, 
stupidity, and madness of war, while each nation 
impoverishes itself still in the endeavor to pre- 
pare for war; 

That individually we love our children better 
than anything in the world, while collectively, as 

48 



a city, we leave no spaces for their playgrounds, 
but compel them to romp in the streets among the 
horses, street cars, and automobiles; 

That we lock men up in prison as an antidote 
to crime, and when they come out they are more 
hardened criminals than before; 

That we gather in churches and worship Jesus, 
yet consider as perfectly absurd and irrational 
the teachings He most insisted upon, deriding 
His faith in humdn nature. His law of love, and 
His principle of non-resistance; while the thing 
against which He warned us most strictly, the 
heaping up of money, is the one thing after which 
we are all mad; 

That those of us most favored by fortune are 
in the heated pursuit of happiness, while we know 
very well that nobody who pursuea happiness ever 
found it; 

That we easily believe in selfishness and hate, 
which render us unhappy, while it is hard for us 
to believe in love and goodness, which make us 
happy; 

That man should "put an enemy into his mouth 
to steal away his brains"; 

That politics is universally despised among us, 
while the only possible way to make a democracy 
successful is for every citizen to take an active in- 
terest in politics ; 

• That the accepted method of preparing our 
sons and daughters for life is to send them to in- 
stitutions sooted with medievalism, and while but 

49 



one person in a hundred Is by nature fitted to be- 
come a scholar or literary person, we continue the 
useless effort to make scholars out of those who 
are to become merchants, hand workers, sales- 
men, and housewives; 

That while we all believe in majority rule, our 
cities are still governed by a compact minority 
composed of men of deficient character; 

That we exert the greatest effort to be pleasant 
to strangers and mere acquaintances, for whom 
we care little or nothing, while we are neglectful, 
indifferent and often cruel to those we love most 
dearly; 

That most of our worry is about the past, which 
is gone forever, and the future, which may never 
come, while we omit to enjoy to-day, which is all 
that we have to enjoy, and 

That those who observe customs and conven- 
tions are called wise and safe, while those who 
believe In their reason, listen to the dictates of 
their heart, and trust their instinct are considered 
dangerous, If not wicked. 



50 



WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH ART? 

Shortly after the first production of the opera 
"Nail," at Paris, I met its composer, Mr, Isa- 
dore Lara, who, I found, saw eye to eye with me 
on the question, "What's the Matter With Art?" 

"The trouble is," he said, in substance, "that 
opera is controlled by a small class of people. 
It ought to belong to the whole people." 

In other words, that same thing is the matter 
with art that is the matter with almost everything 
else, to wit: class. 

Like every other department of human activ- 
ity, art awaits the liberating touch of democracy. 

Like everything else, art can have nothing so 
bad happen to it as to be patronized. 

So long as the artist is dependent upon the ca- 
price of millionaires and kings, it will be ham- 
pered. 

The best friend of the artist is the people. 
What he needs is a public, not a patron. 

To serve the public gives a man freedom, mas- 
tery, inspiration. To please a patron invariably 
produces the spirit of a valet. 

First of all, the public must be brought to 
realize that art Is not the plaything of the rich, 

51 



but the food of the whole community. That it Is 
civilizing, refining, has distinct human value. 

When it reaches this point it will pay its artists. 
It will provide scope, in its public halls, churches, 
galleries, and parks, for the painter and sculptor. 

It will maintain, each city its own opera house, 
where the masterpieces of all ages can be given 
at prices the people can afford to pay. 

It will abolish the "star" nuisance. 

The singers and players will be chosen from 
among each country's own youth. We shall go 
to hear, not Caruso or Tetrazzini, but La Tosca 
and the Mastersingers. 

So far from democracy meaning the universal 
dulness of mediocrity, it means opportunity for 
real superiority; it means merit to the front, and 
the contempt of push, pull, influence, and money. 

As monarchy has been abolished in America 
in the realm of politics, as hierarchy has been put 
by in religion, and as we are working to get wealth 
into the control of the whole people, instead of a 
few, so art needs to be delivered from patronage 
and made a public good. 



52 



THE AMERICAN PENAL SYSTEM 

It is hard, It is almost impossible, for advo- 
cates of a change in custom or government to get 
out from under a charge which has worn down to 
a platitude. 

The average man refuses to think, when he can 
get his thinking ready-made. 

For Instance, we, who believe that prisons and 
punishments are wrong, are generally classed with 
the sentimental perverts who pet criminals, with 
the women who carry bouquets to murderers, 
weep over the sad lot of burglars that have been 
justly laid by the heels, and want to feed them pie. 

Allow us, therefore, to clearly state our point 
of view. 

We are not opposed to the present prison sys- 
tem because of pity for jail birds. We are sorry 
for them, as any human being Is sorry to witness 
suffering, but if their punishment were good for 
them or for society at large we would gladly ap- 
plaud their stripes. 

But our position is this: that The Facts in 
THE Case Prove beyond any reasonable doubt 
that the theory of punishment is both impotent 
for good and fruitful of evil. 

53 



Why do we punish a thief or robber, for ex- 
ample? For three reasons only. 

First, to protect the community against him. 
We incarcerate him, shave his head, put him at 
hard labor, isolate him, or even hang him, so that 
innocent citizens may be safe from his pernicious 
activities. 

Second, we punish him to "teach him a lesson," 
to change him and make him an honest man. 

Third, it is also to give an example to other 
evildoers and by fear to dissuade them from 
crime. 

All very well. The only trouble is, that send- 
ing a man to the penitentiary does Not result 
in any of these benefits. 

As a rule, which any intelligent prison keeper 
will verify, the convict who has served his time 
comes back to society A Worse Criminal Than 
When He Went to Prison. From being an 
ordinary man, who committed a crime by impulse, 
he has become a member of the hardened crim- 
inal class and is a greater menace to the common- 
wealth than ever. 

As a rule, instead of prison changing him to an 
honest man, it Makes Him a More Vicious 
Man. It destroys the little good character he 
had. 

And, as a rule, instead of his punishment de- 
terring others it psychologically Develops More 
Criminals. 

Why, therefore, keep up a system that is 

54 



proved by experience and reason to work pre- 
cisely contrary to what we expected it to work? 

It is a pleasure to note that the more intelligent 
of the lawyers themselves are with us. At least 
they cannot be accused of maudlin sentimentality. 
At a recent meeting of the American Bar As- 
sociation, at Montreal, at which session William 
H. Taft was chosen president, Mr. Moorfield 
Storey of Massachusetts declared the American 
penal system a failure. 

"Our prisons are manufactories of criminals, 
and it is time we changed our whole method of 
dealing with convicts," he said. 

"All convicted persons should be turned over 
to a commission charged with full responsibility 
for their care and custody under an indetermi- 
nate sentence, with authority to release them at 
such time and on such terms as would guarantee 
their future harmlessness to society. 

"In Other Words, We Should Treat 
Criminals .Rather As Sick Men Than As 
Bad Men, and Our Places of Confinement 
As Hospitals Rather Than As Prisons." 



$S 



IN PRAISE OF LAZINESS 

I MAKE no bones of it, but here confess and set 
down that I am lazy. I was born lazy and it has 
grown on me. I would never move at all if it did 
not hurt so to remain in one position. The only 
reason I take exercise is in order to relax after- 
ward. 

Furthermore, I raise my voice in defense of 
the army of the lazy ones. They are the salt of 
the earth. 

A lazy person does better work than an indus- 
trious body. He puts a fiery energy into his task 
because he wants to finish it as soon as possible. 

A lazy boy will saw wood fast so that he can 
get through and rest. A lazy girl sweeps the 
room with whirlwind activity, while the girl who 
loves work will fiddle about all morning. 

It is laziness that is the spring of human prog- 
ress. 

Because a lazy man wanted to get out of the 
job of currying the horse, he thought out a plan 
for putting a bucket of gasoline under the buggy 
seat, whereby we ride like the wind. 

Because lazy folks hated to climb stairs, eleva- 
tors were invented. 

S6 



Because people were too lazy to get off the 
train and go to the lunch counter, they devised 
dining cars; and being too lazy to ride on the 
railway all night sitting up, they contrived sleep- 
ing cars. 

Being too lazy to dip his pen in the ink every 
few seconds, some genius invented the fountain 
pen. And being too lazy even to use that, he pro- 
ceeded to build a typewriter. Also too lazy to run 
the typewriter himself, he started the fashion of 
having girl typists. 

It was a lazy genius that thought of making a 
patent cigar lighter out of a flint stone and ben- 
zine, because he was too tired to strike matches. 

Likewise, who would have conceived the idea 
of a iireless cooker except some woman too lazy 
to stand over the cook stove? 

The eight-day clock is due to the unwillingness 
of men to wind the thing up every evening; and 
now they have clocks that will run a year. 

The coat-shirt is the triumph of laziness too 
great to put the garment on over one's head, In 
the good old style. 

It Is to almighty laziness we owe the ocean 
liner, the electric telegraph, the baby wagon, the 
buggy spring. Cook's tours, the shoe-horn and the 
works of Mark Twain. 

It Is told of the last named that when he 
worked In a newspaper office he would pay the 
office boy a nickel to sweep around him so that 
he would not have to take his feet off the table. 

57 



If everybody was an earnest and toiling little 
Willie that just ate up work and loved to employ 
every moment in useful energy, we should lapse 
into barbarism. 

It is because the race is so blamed trifling and 
shiftless that it forges ahead. 



THE LADIES' CARD GAME 

I NEVER understood the calling business until 
one day I found my small children, with the chil- 
dren of some of the neighbors, playing in the 
nursery. They had a number of cards and were 
depositing them, with much ceremony, at various 
chairs about the room. 

Then I saw. It is a Game. 

Compared to calling, football and baseball are 
second rate In popularity. 

It Is a game especially for ladies, more espe- 
cially for those fair ones who are hobbled by no 
useful occupation. It is played as follows : 

You take a deck of cards, more properly speak- 
ing, a package of cards; nice, new, white cards, 
which the lady in charge of the stationery at the 
department store will have printed for you, ac- 
cording to Hoyle. 

Then you foot It, or If you live In a city where 
distances are great, you hire a cab ; or If you want 
to appear the indubitable thing you own a ve- 
hicle with your monogram on the door, and you 
go to all the houses on your list. 

Arriving at the door you ring the bell. A ser- 
vant appears. You ask if Mrs. Van Dunsensnip- 
per Is at home. 

59 



If she is, you go into the parlor and wait till 
she gets her hair fixed. When she comes down 
you engage in a little short and pleasant conver- 
sation; the shorter the pleasanter. 

If she is not at home you leave a certain num- 
ber of your cards with the maid, which is still 
pleasanter. I don't know what the right number 
is, but it is very important. 

You check the lady off your list. By and by 
all the ladies you have dealt cards to come around 
to your house and deal. 

That this is a game is proved by the fact that 
it is fatal, unforgivable, to make a mistake. In 
business, when you make an error, you apologize 
and pay up and go ahead. But in a game, when 
you make a slip, you're Out. 

A male friend of mine observed that he couldn't 
guess what the Sam Hill it was all about. But 
he was plain ignorant. There are also people 
that do not enjoy baseball. « 

If the ladies want to play cards in a taxicab, 
let them alone. It is more healthful, to say the 
least, than playing poker in the Black Hole of 
Calcutta, otherwise known as the card room of 
the club. 



60 



LOVE AND WISDOM] 

A CORRESPONDENT wHtes : "When people are 
married we often hear, 'What could he or she see 
in the other?' 

"Does love give a deeper insight and see a 
worth really there, or does it merely overheat the 
fancy to imagine a worth not there? 

"Will you give an explanation of this?" 

I will. Because there are few questions of 
deeper concern to thousands than this. 

For practical purposes, for living one's life in 
peace and happiness, it is more Important to know 
about the laws of love than the laws of chemistry 
or of the United States. 

The question asked by my correspondent is a 
great big vital one, up to date, and almost a mat- 
ter of life and death. 

Here, therefore, is the answer: Love is not a 
delusion. Love is the only thing that can see 
truth. 

That is true not only in the relation of men 
and women but everywhere else. 

The reason Edison is a wizard at invention is 
not only because of his genius, but also because 
he loves his laboratory work. 

6i 



No man can handle a horse who does not love 
a horse. 

The best cook Is the best lover of cooking. 

The greatest baseball player is the most tre- 
mendous lover of the game, other things being 
equal. 

The best novelist or story writer Is the one 
who most wholly loves the characters he creates. 

The best actor Is the greatest lover of his art. 

The only preacher of any account Is the one 
who Is infatuated with preaching. 

There Is only one potency. It is love. There 
is only one vision. It Is love. There Is only one 
wisdom. It is love. There is only one religion. 
It is love. 

You cannot get anything out of a book unless 
you love it. 

You cannot teach children unless you love them. 

Money never did any permanent good in the 
world. One loving heart outweighs all the gifts 
of Carnegie and Rockefeller in its results on 
the welfare of mankind. 

Love sees. It is not blind. Indifference is 
blind. The cold heart is blind. 

There is only one tragedy. It is when love 
dies. 

Love creates. Coldness is impotent. 

Love has that faith (trust) which saves the 
world. Intellect has those doubts which unloose 
the world. Love is synthetic. Intellect is an- 
alytic. 

62 



The bottommost pit of hell, Dante says, is 
frozen; the seat of the Eternal in heaven glows 
with heat and light. 

The Devil, Mephistopheles, according to 
Goethe, is pure intellect. "He never loved a hu- 
man soul." 

"God," says the Bible, "is love." 

This earth was made for lovers, and he who 
loves not, though he be walking about, is dead, 
dead, dead. 



63 



THE SICK ROOM 

The newspaper pages are filled with tides of 
vigorous life. Advertisers exploit their goods, 
theatres display their attractions, there are the 
activities of crime, of politics, of sport; the virile 
stream of humanity leaps and sparkles beneath 
the reader's eye. 

And all the while a great part of these readers 
are in a condition where the arena of strife does 
not interest them, and the warmth of the world's 
blood chills them. I speak of the sick. 

They are shut up in darkened bedrooms, they 
lie in hospital wards, they sit solitary by the win- 
dow of the sitting-room, or hobble about with 
crutch or cane. They are the wounded in life's 
battle, the driftwood upon the banks of life's, 
stream. 

So here's a word for them. 

Do not imagine that because you are not well 
you are out of the game. Opportunity is still 
yours. Some of the best and finest work done for 
the human race is done by the sick people. 

You may no longer be a centre of active work 
in the business of money-getting, you cannot go 
to your office nor attend to your house, but you 
can do better than that. You can be a centre of 

64 



cheer and encouragement to all who know you. 

If you will put away self-pity, if you will not 
complain, if you will be just as courageous and 
intelligent in the business of being unwell as you 
were in the street and mart when you were well, 
if in your weakened body you will maintain a 
stout heart, you cannot realize how you will 
radiate life and power into all who come in con- 
tact with you. 

The sick room may be the temple of the house. 

There's a little old blind grandmother in a cer- 
tain home who, by her spirit of sanity and her 
sense of human values, has reconciled her daugh- 
ter and son-in-law who were drifting toward 
alienation, brought a wayward granddaughter 
and a foolish college grandson to their senses, 
and governs that household not with a rod of 
iron but with a fairy wand of subtler power. 

There is a man, once active in great affairs, 
a figure in the money world, but now sitting help- 
less with paralysis. He is just as brave and hope- 
ful now as ever. Around his affliction have 
bloomed priceless flowers of love and tenderness, 
of whose existence he was never before aware. 

Your sickness may be a privilege. It will show 
you, if you can take it heroically, the very best 
things in life. 

You are out of the game of getting-on, but 
you are placed where certain factors of life of 
inestimable value may be made clear and usable 
to you. 

6s 



In fact, the best part of living is not monopo- 
lized by the healthy people. Sickness has its spirit- 
compensations. Life is very great and wide and 
high, it has vast mysteries that active people 
miss. It has reaches of thought and feeling they 
cannot know. 

In your quiet room you may find your soul, 
your real self; you may have experiences so rich 
and strange that, when you grow well again, if 
so be that shall come to pass, you will look back 
upon these shaded and idle days, as the traveller 
who has crossed the desert remembers the oasis. 



m 



UP AGAINST IT 

, It is a terse Americanism, and expresses in 
solid, idiomatic language a solid, bitter fact: "Up 
Against It." 

There's an army of them right in this city, an 
army of soldiers that battle for sustenance, an 
army fighting in the last ditch. 

I saw and talked with one the other day. She 
was a mere child, just twenty-two. Her clothes 
were not new. Her neck was thin, her cheeks 
thin, her eyes, it seemed, too large. 

"I am still trying to get a job," she said. "Oh I 
I'm pretty well; only I haven't as much strength 
as I had. You see, when I don't eat regularly it 
tells on me. I don't eat every day, and some days 
I only get one meal. And then I walk from 
where I room to the business places downtown. 
It's a long way. I get awful tired. My land- 
lady is awful good to me. She's waiting till I 
get my job. Gee! it's fierce to be up against it!" 

Yet withal she was brave, cheerful, self-re- 
specting, keeping her soul and her little body 
clean, while she fought with the wild wolves that 
hunt in cities. 

"I got a raise yesterday," said a young man, 

67 



a friend of mine. "I pawned my watch. I had 
a grand feed." 

He had come to the city to study music. Oh! 
the heart-breaking company of them that hope 
to live by music! For every singer in a church 
choir, getting $5 a Sunday, twenty stand hungry 
for the place. For every girl in the theatre 
chorus, twenty have been turned away to tramp 
further. For every clerk in the stores there are 
three in line waiting, up against it. 

It is the firing line of civilization. 

It is the thin red line we have thrown out to 
meet the common enemy, Hunger. 

Late at night I have seen them on the benches 
in the parks, sitting with a newspaper over the 
knees. There seems to be a deal of warmth in 
a newspaper. I have talked with them. They 
are sociable folks, much easier to approach than 
successful people. 

I have always loved failures. They are more 
human. Their souls seem more visible than the 
souls of the prosperous. 

Where the Salvation Army's drums are beating 
and horns blowing they congregate. That is my 
favorite church. Surely if the Messiah is any- 
where He may be found there. 

You can see them in the saloons. A glass of 
beer can be got for five cents. It is the little 
bit of light in lives most terribly dark. 

They are not all tfamps. There are mothers 
yp against It, holding babies, looking all night 

68 



into the darkness, as if into the eyes of Pauguk. 

There are hard-working fathers who have 
plodded all day searching for what means more 
to them than salvation — a job. 

There are boys, for whom crime bids. 

There are girls, for whom human tigers lie in 
wait. 

There are little children. I saw two, a little 
boy and girl, the other morning early; they were 
going through a garbage can, looking for scraps 
of food. 

Those who have never been up against it do 
not know what a tragic world this is. 



69 



THE KITCHEN 

If I ever get money enough to build a house 
of my own the first thing I shall construct will 
be the kitchen. 

The kitchen is to the home what the stomach 
is to the body. The Greeks used to think the 
soul was located in the stomach, and it wasn't 
a bad guess. Certain it is that you cannot see 
much glory in the universe while you have any 
kind of a stomachache. 

My kitchen will be five things : big, light, clean, 
well equipped, and comfortable to loaf in. 

To begin with the last, I do not see why a man 
who owns a house should be excluded from an 
essential part of it. Why should I be condemned 
to sit always in the front room surrounded by 
uncomfortable furniture, slippery floors, and 
fragile bric-a-brac, while the hired girl enjoys a 
neat, homey kitchen? 

When I feel like it I want to occupy a cane 
rocker by the window, look around upon shining 
brass stewpans, and read in the recipe book how 
to make ginger cookies. 

And then the sounds of the kitchen. They 
are more intimately lovely than any other house- 

70 



voices. First and foremost the song of the tea 
kettle : It just sings home and mother and solid 
comfort right into the core of your everlasting 
soul. Then the roar of the fire in the stove, the 
bubbling of the pot where the potatoes are boil- 
ing, the angry sputter of ham frying, and above 
all the solemn tick-tock of the old clock, beating 
time like an orchestra leader over the whole per- 
formance. 

Also come the odors of the kitchen; the fra- 
grance of bread just out of the oven, of the fowl 
done to a turn, filling the air with an aroma be- 
yond that of flowers, and. Lord bless us all! if 
that isn't a real pumpkin pie the cook has just 
delivered Into the world! It is an event that 
should be celebrated with cheer and song. 

The eye feasts likewise. I want a floor of old- 
fashioned red brick on my kitchen floor; In all 
the realm of art no color is so rich. I want the 
copper utensils to gleam like burnished shields 
upon the shelf. I want to see the flash of the 
Sabatier knives in a row on the wall, weapons 
in the noble war of gastronomy. I want to see 
the old Delft-blue bowls and brown cooking ves- 
sels round about. Besides, there are the white- 
ness of white flour on the biscuit board, the spark- 
ling heaps of sugar, the rosy-cheekedness of ap- 
ples, the orangeness of oranges, and the grapeness 
of grapes. 

There is no place where you can feel so hu- 
man as in the kitchen. When you are tired of 

71 



being respectable, and your soul is sick of good 
clothes, oh, to come aside a while here, in slip- 
pers and shirt-sleeves, and in the cane rocker 
aforesaid read in peace in your daily paper all 
the antics of this mountebank world! 

And then — best of all — ^the little boy comes in, 
you know what he wants, and although it is 
against the rules, you steal for him two Jonathan 
apples and three sugar cookies; he beams undy- 
ing love at you, and skips out before mother sees 
him, while you, partner in such delicious crime, 
read your paper as if nothing had happened. 



,72 



SUPERFLUOUS ENERGY 

One of the most astounding things in nature 
Is the waste of sun-force. Frank W. Very, in an 
article in the Popular Science Monthly, calls at- 
tention to this, saying: 

"The earth is a mere point in space, and re- 
ceives no more than one 2,200,000,000th of the 
radiant energy the sun is outpouring so lavishly." 
Yet from this almost infinitesimal fraction of the 
sun's total radiation practically all known forces 
on earth are due. 

The power of wind and wave and tide, of fire 
and its son, steam, of plant and animal life, of 
glacial movement, of rain and snow, even of all 
growth in trees and herbs and all forms of animal 
energy, come from this crumb of solar potency 
caught by the whirling world. 

And this apparent waste and extravagance 
characterizes all nature, and men and their spirit- 
ual dynamics. 

It is a law of mind. You cannot learn one 
fact alone. Your study, your experience, must 
embrace a myriad of facts; only so will the one 
remain with you. 

From months and years of "practice" the 
pianist culls at last the flower of perfection. 

73 



You read a book of 400 pages, and are lucky 
If one paragraph sticks. 

To make forty sales the department store must 
induce 400 customers to come and look. 

The travelling salesman interviews twenty mer- 
chants to get three or four who will place orders 
with him. 

This is the law of success: Keep trying; if 
you want one man to give you employment or 
buy your wares you must apply to many men. 

Out from every soul pours the power of per- 
sonal influence. All but a minute fraction of 
it seems wasted, as in the case of the sun. You 
must be kind a thousand times to be effectually 
kind once. You must forgive seventy times seven 
to find the one instance where forgiveness counts. 
A hundred times must you be courageous if you 
hope to be brave the one time when it will be 
worth while. 

The teacher knows how in the schoolroom she 
must sow beside all waters to make a few seeds 
grow. 

An editor writes one appeal in his daily news^ 
paper. A hundred thousand copies are bought. 
Perhaps 5,000 persons glance at his article. Five 
hundred read it through. One hundred are in- 
terested. Ten perhaps are persuaded. 

Of the countless volumes of philosophy, how 
rare are those that reach and fecundate the re- 
ceptive mind! 

What becomes of all the wasted energy of 

74 



suns, souls, books and all powers, physical and 
spiritual? We do not know. We believe that 
somehow Nature, in her nicely balanced adjust- 
ments, throws nothing away, and transforms into 
other kinds of energy all superfluous vigor. 

But the observer may learn, if he be wise, not 
to be discouraged at the apparent fruitlessness 
of his effort, but to go on, as the sun for many 
millions of years has gone on, putting forth his 
full vitality, that some fragment be used. 



IS 



WHY WAS I BORN? 

There is one question upon the answer to 
which rests the success or failure of life. 

It is the question: "Why was I born?" 

A strange fact is that nobody knows the an- 
swer. The purpose which the Creator had in 
mind when He made me has never been known, 
never will be known. 

Curious that the most fateful of all problems 
should be forever unanswerable ! 

We may Believe this or that to be the rea- 
son why we were created; we cannot Know. 

Notwithstanding this fact, the net result of 
my life depends upon The Theory I form to an- 
swer this query. 

But how can I tell which theory is best when 
there is no means of knowing which is true? 

There is a way to tell which theory is, if not 
true, at least approximately true. This way is 
suggested by what is called Pragmatism. 

That is to say: That answer to the question 
is most likely to be true Which Will Work. 

We cannot answer the question "Why was I 
born?" by investigating Causes. The secrets of 
life are beyond us. The Creator will not be in- 
terviewed. 

76 



But we can select an answer by noting Results. 
For instance: 

"I was made in order that I might get all the 
pleasure possible out of life." This solution 
means wreckage. Its fallacy is proved by insane 
hospitals, feeble-minded asylums, and by those 
murders, adulteries, and heart-breaks that con- 
stantly attend the end of the pleasure seeker. 

"I was made in order that I might escape this 
evil world and get safely into a better one after 
death." Such an answer leads logically to the 
asceticism that marked the dark ages and the 
hard morbidity that characterized Puritanism. 

"I was born to labor for others" means a race 
of slaves. 

"I was born to live and to enjoy myself upon 
the fruits of others' labor" means a class of snobs. 

The most satisfactory answer, in twentieth cen- 
tury terms, is: "I was born to express what 
forces my Creator planted in me; to develop my 
instincts and talents under the guidance of rea- 
son ; to find permanent happiness by fostering the 
higher, more altruistic, and spirit impulses and 
by subduing the violence of the more brutal im- 
pulses. I was born to find love and my own work, 
and through these liberty. In one word the pur- 
pose of creating me was that I should be as Great 
as possible." 

Only by this answer do we get strength with- 
out cruelty, virtue without narrowness, beauty 
without effeminacy, love without contamination, 

77 



reverence without superstition, joy without excess. 
I do not Know this answer is correct. I Be- 
lieve it to be the Most Nearly correct for the 
simple reason that It Works. 



78 



^ 



THE OUTPOPULATING POWER 

There is a war constantly going on. It is not 
of axe upon helm, shot upon armor plate, duels 
of death-spitting dreadnoughts, nor airplanes 
dropping bombs upon a sleeping city. 

It is a deeper battle, subterranean as instinct, 
unseen as nature's hidden laws. 

Deep as the cause of the running of sap in 
spring. Deep as the reason why Sahara is 
parched and the Mississippi Valley is watered. 

A battle unnoticed as glacier movements, ir- 
resistible as the succession of geologic eras, piti- 
less as Time, sure as the precession of the equi- 
noxes. 

It is the battle of blood against blood, race 
against race, stock against stock. 

It is the war of the powers of procreation. 

It Is the elemental competition in fecundity. 

"What constitutes a state?" asks Sir William 
Jones; and answers his question: "Not cities 
proud with spires and turrets crowned; not bays 
and broad armed ports, where laughing at the 
storm rich navies ride; but — men"; and his con- 
clusion should be mended; let us rather say, 



"women.' 



79 



The state's ultimate armament is the strong, 
breeding woman. 

Not the war cries of bearded hosts but the 
lusty cries of the army of babies are the terrible 
menace of destiny. 

Sex perversion means the end of the world, 
the people extinguished in madness. Sex unclean- 
ness means a race rushing toward its Day of 
Judgment. 

England builds battleships; it were far better 
she gave heed to the fact that her population is 
decreasing. 

The profoundest crime of American plutocracy 
is that it will not breed, and spreads the death- 
gospel of childlessness to others. 

Look at the fashion papers, the newest mod- 
els in gowns, latest hints from Paris; and see the 
tendency of upper-tendom toward the ideal of 
Kipling's "damn thin-hipted woman" ; man's play- 
thing, not his creative mate! 

Observe the universal fear of the responsibili- 
ties of marriage, the dread of children, the ex- 
pressed creed of a weak race that one should not 
have children until one has gained a competence ! 
The pioneers who hewed the path for the Golden 
West had no such puling timidity. 

In the long evolutionary strife for the survival 
of the fittest that nation shall conquer that shall 
not shrink from applying science to the procrea- 
tion of itself ; that shall study eugenics as the key- 
problem of destiny; that shall drive out sex-per- 

80 



version from life and literature with the whip 
of life-preserving scorn; that shall idealize with 
the utmost beauty of poet and romancer the mat- 
ing of its young; that shall tear the veils of false 
modesty and criminal ignorance from the sex in- 
stinct and replace them with the halo of truth, 
knowledge, and self-reverence; that shall reject 
the mediaeval shame of nature and take pride in 
Its virility; that shall exalt in its heart and sup- 
port and protect with all its resources the woman 
who bears children and devotes her life to their 
bringing up. 

For the vanguard of a nation's conquest, and 
the last citadel of its defense, is not the armed 
man norjhe war machine; it is the Mother. 



8i 



INTELLIGENT OPTIMISM 

There is an intelligent optimism, and there are 
several varieties of fool optimism. 

There is a theological optimism that claims to 
have proved that this is "the best possible world" ; 
it is a hopefulness built on logic, and is rather 
unconvincing to the modern mind. 

There is a kind of self-willed optimism, an as- 
sumption that all is well whether it's well or not, 
a postulating, assertive optimism that grins even 
at funerals, from a sense of duty. People of 
this cult are rather trying. They are always 
telling you that "all is for the best" when you 
know very well that certain things are for the 
worst. 

Intelligent optimism, however, does not declare 
that all is good, including the devil and disease, 
but it asserts that the general law of progress 
is upward, that there is much good in things as 
they are, that it is conducive to our comfort and 
efficiency to let our niinds dwell upon that rather 
than upon the evil, and that we are capable of 
making things better and propose to do so. 

Our confidence in the constant improvement of 
the world is not a matter of faith. We do not 

82 



need to shut our eyes, cross our fingers, and re- 
peat a creed. Our assurance is based upon knowl- 
edge. An understanding of history, of the condi- 
tions of society in former times compared to this 
time, and of the steady growth of liberty and civil 
rights, forms the foundation of our conclusion. 

Further ground for our hopefulness consists in 
our realization that it is in men's power to im- 
prove the world they live in. We are finding out 
that human welfare grows, not only by Provi- 
dence or superhuman "laws," but also by our own 
efforts. By organized exertion we have over- 
turned tyrannies, abolished slavery, removed 
plagues, and rendered life in the twentieth cen- 
tury a hundred times more agreeable than it was 
in the eighteenth. What we have done we can 
continue to do. We can go on improving our 
state, we can produce wealth less wastefuUy and 
distribute profits more fairly, we can raise the 
condition of the workingman, liberate woman, 
give children better training, curb swollen for- 
tunes and wealth-combinations, take better care of 
our unfortunates, and do much toward prevent- 
ing crime and poverty. We no longer look to 
kings and nobles to do those things for us, we 
no longer merely pray and hope for the Deity to 
do them, we are conscious of the ability to help 
along by our own activities. Hence our optimism. 

But optimism is not only a logical affair. It 
is a state of mind, a temperamental product. 
Wherever you find health, vigor, and work, you 

83 



find optimism. Pessimism is a secretion of a 
morbid mind, of weakness, anemia or idleness. 

We are optimists because we are better fed, 
housed, and clothed, have more books and news- 
papers, have the remedy for social wrongs in 
our own hands in the agency of democracy, and 
in short have a faith and joy in life and its pos- 
sibilities not based upon tradition or authority, 
but upon facts, upon instincts, and upon the con- 
sciousness of our own strength. 

That is why this great people front the future 
with "morning faces," and refuse to melt in fear 
at the alarms of the calamity-howlers. 



% 



THE SCRAP PILE 

The human scrap pile. 

The refuse, the discard, the useless, the non- 
producers, the wasters, the parasites, the loafers, 
the do-nothings, the consumers of unearned food, 
the wearers of given clothes, the stalled, fattened, 
curried, sleek human animals devouring the sub- 
stance of them that sweat and toil. 

Wherever you find an idle group you find a 
septic point in mankind. 

Among the "rights of man" there is no right 
to work not. 

The conscience of the Twentieth Century thun- 
ders the commandment of Carlyle: "Find thy 
work! Produce! Produce! In God's name, pro- 
duce!" 

The prosperity of America is attacked already 
by that species of vermin that always infest ac- 
cumulated wealth, vested privilege, old-standing 
institutions. 

The tramps, hoboes, and slum loafers are not 
our severest menace. The unemployed rkh men, 
who do nothing but amuse themselves and spend 
their own or their father's money, are just as 
bad. 

85i 



The women who flit from northern fashionable 
resort hotels in summer to southern fashionable 
hotels in winter, who spend their days in motor- 
ing and their evenings at cards, whose whole en- 
ergy is occupied in dress and schemes of pre- 
cedence, are but particles of that heap of waste 
and poison that must be swept away before de- 
mocracy shall find a basis of justice and peace. 
They are the seed of the coming revolution. They 
are the kindlings for the cleansing fires of Des- 
tiny. 

There is direct connection between the work- 
house convicts and the hangers-about at the snob 
palaces of American plutocracy. 

A. A. McCormick, president of the County 
Board of Cook County (Chicago), speaking of 
the efforts being made to put paupers and out- 
casts to work, observed: 

"The human scrap pile for which we have to 
pay is cluttered up, not alone with the paupers and 
the 'down and outs,' but with the idle rich, who 
sit around luxurious hotels and watering places 
with nothing to do but overeat and sleep. I was 
astounded by the waste of human energy at the 
county institutions, but I am appalled when I 
think of that far greater waste of energy among 
those whose wants have been provided for and 
who have nothing to do but dress for dinner. 

"We have 2,500 persons sitting with folded 
hands in our county institutions, content because 
their wants have been provided for. I could 

86 



not help thinking of our wealthy outcasts in this 
connection. They are really beyond the pale of 
human effort, for they are doing nothing that is 
of good to anybody, not even to themselves. 

"The idle wealthy are going on the scrap pile 
voluntarily. They are not only useless but harm- 
ful. Somebody ought to wake them up and make 
them think." 



87 



AISCHROLATREIA 

AiscHROLATREiA IS a word used by Frederic 
Harrison, and his definition of it is "the worship 
of the ugly, the nasty, and the brutal." 

The human soul has its laws as fixed as the 
laws of the human body. Feed the body enough 
alcohol and you will get delirium tremens. Feed 
the soul enough sensual emotion, and cultivate it 
with introspection, and you get aischrolatreia. 

Any egotism is bad, but emotional egotism is 
poison. 

The best part of life is feeling, but it is al- 
ways the best things that are most liable to ex- 
cess. Beyond a certain point enthusiasm becomes 
madness, love becomes perversion, and the taste 
for beauty becomes the taste for the hideous. 

Even in religious emotion this is true. As 
Charles H. Spurgeon said, "Excessive spiritual- 
ity is akin to sensuality." 

The antidote to toxic emotion is work, accom- 
plishment, activity. Where one has no task, no 
pressure of duty, the soul rots. It is the idle class 
that is the dangerous class, because having no 
work the soul gives itself over to the search for 
new sensations. This is as bad as taking opium, 
cocaine, or whiskey. 

88 



The first buds of passion in the soul are the 
most exquisitely beautiful of all human experi- 
ence. Give yourself over to the pursuit of pas- 
sion, however, and your end will be the most hor- 
rible torture conceivable. 

Cubism and Futurism in art are the results 
of unrestrained love of beauty; they are that 
hideousness into which egoistic emotional drunk- 
enness leads. After a while the art drunkard 
finds no satisfaction in the simplicities of nature; 
nothing but the distorted can arouse him, just 
as after a while the victim of alcoholism has no 
taste for beer or honest wine, but must have ab- 
sinthe, mescal, or vodka. 

It was because of the cumulative danger of 
pleasure, when followed solely, that the Puritans 
sought to prohibit it. But the master word of 
morality is not prohibition ; it is self-control. Life 
needs love, beauty, laughter, and its measure of 
rational inebriation. Without these the soul 
hardens. Yet with these, and without self-con- 
trol, the soul fevers and decays. 

The law of life is not "Never!" It is "Never 
too much!" This was the motto of Socrates. 

A good example of the ruin of over-emotion- 
alism is found in the poet Baudelaire. He gave 
himself up to feeling and to analyzing the emo- 
tions of his inner life. Typical of his philosophy 
are these words from one of his prose-poems : 

"One must ever be drunken. Everything is in 
that; it is the only question. In order not to feel 

89 



the horrible burden of Time that is breaking your 
shoulders, bending you earthwards, you must be 
ceaselessly drunken. 

"But with what? With wine, poetry, or virtue, 
as you will — only intoxicate yourself; and if 
sometimes, on the steps of a palace, on the green- 
sward of a grave, or in the mournful solitude of 
your room, you wake to find the intoxication di- 
minished or vanished, ask of the wind, or the 
wave, or the star, or the bird, or the clock . . . 
ask what time it is; and the wind, wave, star, 
bird, and clock will tell you: 'It is time to be 
drunken.' Lest you should be the martyred 
slaves of Time, be ceaselessly drunken! With 
wine, poetry, or virtue, as you will." 

The life of Baudelaire went out in the impo- 
tence of despair, the agony of self-torture. His 
beauty worship finished in aischrolatreia. His 
sterile genius left nothing to mankind. 

Compare his sentiment with that of another 
man who gave as his life-motive : "I must work 
the works of him that sent me, while it is day; 
for the night cometh when no man can work." 
The life of this man has been a fountain of in- 
exhausted passion for a thousand years. 



90 



THE MIRTH CURE 

There are all manner of cures, from mud 
baths and Perkins's Patent Porous Plaster up to 
Thought Vibrations, but the grandest of all is 
the Mirth Cure. 

It keeps well in any climate, is guaranteed un- 
der the pure food and drug law, doesn't cost a 
cent, and has helped others. Why not you? 

The formula is found in the writings of the 
wisest man, who was a Jewish king and philos- 
opher. He said: 

"A merry heart doeth good like a medicine." 

Note — he did not say a merry wife, though she 
certainly does good. (Perhaps he had too many 
wives and was afraid he would be asked which 
one.) 

He did not say a merry husband, though he 
helps some. 

Nor did he say merry children, nor a merry 
house, nor a merry occupation, nor any such thing. 

For his wise old eyes saw too deeply into life 
to make the mistake of supposing that circum- 
stances are the root of joy. He knew that the 
real fountain of mirth is the heart. 

If you have a merry heart it makes no differ- 

91 



ence what may be your position, whether you 
be a tramp on the road, a scrubwoman in an 
office building, a brakeman, a street car conduc- 
tor, a merchant man, or even a college president. 
You are an electric light in the fog of human 
despondency, sunshine breaking through earth- 
sorrow clouds, water to parched souls. 

Did you ever hear the story of "The Happy 
Man's Shirt?" It is an old one, but one of those 
that ought constantly be retold. 

There was once a king who was smitten with 
sadness and disgust of life. He had gorged at 
all human pleasures, could no more be amused, 
and now was like to die. 

They called in the soothsayers and medicine 
men, but none could suggest a remedy. At last 
they sent to an old hermit who lived in the wood, 
who said: "The case is simple. Let the king 
sleep all night in a happy man's shirt, and he will 
be healed." 

Whereupon the king ordered that the palace 
be searched, a happy man be found and his shirt 
brought. But no happy man could be discovered 
in the palace. 

Then they sought through the city and then 
throughout the length and breadth of the king- 
dom, but no man could they lay hands upon who 
would declare, without reservation or secret eva- 
sion of mind whatever, that he was entirely happy. 

A little group of the king's courtiers were re- 
turning home disconsolate, and as they rode along 

92 



the highway they espied a beggar sitting under 
a tree, playing with the autumn leaves and smil- 
ing to himself. 

*'Hola!" they shouted. "Are you happy?" 

"Surely!" replied the beggarman. 

"Why, you're nothing but a beggar ! You don't 
know where you are going to get your dinner, 
do you?" 

"Oh, no. But it isn't dinner time yet. I had 
a good breakfast." 

Then they told him of the king's plight and 
besought him to give them his shirt forthwith, 
adding that it should be returned to him filled with 
gold pieces. 

At that the ragged man lay back on the grass 
and laughed as if he would expire. 

"Come," said the royal attendants, "we have 
no time for trifling. Off with your shirt, or we 
will jerk it off." 

"Hold hard, gentlemen," said the beggar, striv- 
ing to control his mirth. "That is just what I 
am laughing at. I Ain't Got No Shirt!" 

So they went and told the king that but one 
happy man could be unearthed in all his realm, 
and that one was shirtless. 

And the king had sense enough to perceive that 
happiness does not depend on the shirt you sleep 
in, nor the bed on which you lie, nor the house 
that covers you — no, nor any external thing, but 
comes from the heart within you. 

93, 



Thus was he cured, and arose and went about 
his business; and thus also may you be cured, if 
so be that there is still left unparalyzed in you the 
power to Think. 



94 



DISCARDED THINGS 

The secret of health is the elimination of 
waste. 

The first thing the physician prescribes usually 
is a physic. No matter what ails the patient li 
hardly ever can be a mistake to see that the body 
is well rid of its waste. If the organs of ex- 
cretion go on a strike it is fatal. 

The same law holds in affairs. Every busi- 
ness man knows what pains he must take to keep 
his desk clean, and how papers will accumulate 
on the table and get choked into pigeonholes and 
obstipate letter files and pile up in drawers and 
cases. There are so many things we are not 
quite ready to do to-day, and to-morrow finds 
us still indecisive, and so the documents drift into 
forgotten holes and before long the desk is a jun- 
gle of undone matters. 

It takes moral courage to use the waste basket 
vigorously. 

Some men can work in litter, with papers on 
their desk like snowdrifts, papers stuffed bulging 
full into boxes, papers on the floor about them 
"thick as autumnal leaves that strew the vale of 
Vallombrosa," but I don't understand how they 

95 



do it. An unanswered letter haunts me like the 
ghost of Banquo. An unplgeonholed receipt on 
my table irritates me like a fly. 

The art of life is to discard. 

Progress is clogged by the persistent remnants 
of the outworn past. 

Clogged ! clogged ! clogged ! That is the story 
of the Church, the School, the State. 

Clogged with moth-eaten ideas, with traditional 
passions, with antiquated ideals, with petty moral- 
ities ! 

The past makes the present; the bracts pro- 
tect the flower, but if the bracts persist and the 
blossom cannot throw them off they become throt- 
tling instruments of death. 

The curse and weakness of the law is prece- 
dent, of which it boasts. 

All unjust privilege is but the constipation of 
life. When justice refuses to flow, is dammed 
up by custom, and will not follow in the new chan- 
nels of reason, there we find the iniquitous, stag- 
nant pools of privilege, full of poison, parasitic 
lives. 

What a world it would be if we could swing 
forward unhampered by the past! 

The past is to teach us, not to bind us. It is 
a bane and not a blessing if it does not invigorate 
us to go on. 

The world keeps sweet and sound, young and 
green, because plants die and rot, and the waters 
flow forever by, and institutions crumble, and 

96 



old ideas fade, and Nature is strong enough to 
throw away continually her waste, bring us every 
Spring new flowers, and every Autumn new fruits. 

Swords and books and Bishops' rings! 

Fast they fall upon the pile 
Of the world's discarded things, 

A little use a little while. 



m 



THE BAPTISM 

Clarice had a baby. It was the wonder of 
the island. From the old fisherman down by 
the beach to the Honorable Joneses and Walkers 
up at the big hotel the baby was the subject of 
intense discussion. For everybody liked Clarice 
and her husband, who was a play-actor, and the 
baby was an amazing compound of the excellences 
of both. 

Clarice wanted the baby baptized. No priest 
or minister could be found on the island. "Just 
the same, I shall have the baby baptized," said 
she. "I'll have Berriman do it." Berriman was 
a poet, past sixty, and a beautiful failure. Physi- 
cally he lived on the crusts and edges of things; 
spiritually he ate of the heart of the world. 

So one afternoon they had the christening. And 
Berriman, the poet, spoke, saying: 

"Beloved friends, we are here gathered, in 
the sight of God and in the presence of these 
witnesses, to baptize this child. 

"Baptism is the application of water to the 
human body, solemnly and formally, as a symbol 
of the cleansing of the soul. It is a most ancient 
rite, and is found in all religions. 

98 



"It indicates the adoption of a candidate into 
the membership of the elect. 

"There has always been a superior few, an 
aristocracy in the world. 

"There is the apparent or so-called aristocracy, 
who as a rule are not superior at all; and there 
is the real aristocracy, who are a secret order 
known to themselves only. 

"We are here to baptize this baby into the 
real elect, the real upper-tendom, the real church, 
or ecclesia, or called-out. 

"We therefore consecrate ourselves to teach 
this child to take the Upper Thought as to all 
things. 

"To her, flowers shall not be mere plants, but 
God's thoughts. 

"To her, stars shall be more than burning 
words; they shall be eyes of mystery. 

"To her, men shall not be brutes, whose labor 
is to be exploited; they shall be brothers, 
prophets, spirit flames. 

"To her, the sex feeling, when it comes, shall 
be as a lily, which, though its roots grow in com- 
mon soil, yet lifts its pure petals to perfume the 
air, to make glad the garden, and to greet the 
sun. 

"To her. Events shall not be as the shaking of 
dice, the fortuity of chance; but they shall be 
meaningful moves of the intelligence of destiny, 
which guides men and things by its own perfect 
plan. 

99 



"We consecrate this child to reverence and 
against flippancy; to justice, and against all lies; 
to loyalty, and against deception; to love, and 
against all kinds of hate ; to patience, and against 
petulance; to beauty, and against ugliness; to 
greatness of mind, of heart and of soul, and to 
the world and the fellowship of the entire human 
race, against all littleness and narrowness; to the 
citizenship of the world and against all clans, ex- 
clusive sects, cliques and cults. 

"And this little Citizen of the World and 
Heiress of the Future we commend unto that 
God who has made no thing common and to that 
Master who loved no less than the whole world." 



Too 



THE STAIRWAY 

In the house of life is a great stairway that 
runs from the cellar to the roof. 

And I saw a hog enter the cellar and go up 
the stairs. As he went up he squealed and grunt- 
ed, and looked for refuse to devour, but ever as 
he ascended his squeals turned to laughter and 
his grunts to sighs, and he sought bread and not 
filth to eat. His form also changed, so that when 
he had come to the upper floors he was a man, 
and when he reached the roof he was an angel 
and flew away. 

And I saw also a poisonous snake, and an un- 
clean goat, and a cruel wolf, and a surly bear, 
and a fierce lion, and a snarling dog, and a sneak- 
ing rat, and a wild horse, and a stupid donkey, 
and all manner of inhuman beasts go up, one by 
one, along the stairs, and at every rising step 
each one lost some animality and gained some 
humanity, and each one as he came to the top 
became an angel, as a chrysalis breaks into a but- 
terfly, and flew into the sky. 

And I asked : "What is this stairway of Meta- 
morphosis that begins with the brute and ends 
with the superman?" 

And the interpreter answered and said: "The 
107 



name of this stair, by which men climb to God, 
is Woman." The most significant thing that en- 
ters the life of man or woman is the sex feeling. 

"The sex passion makes or breaks the soul. 

"For ages men considered the sex lure as a 
device of the devil to destroy mankind. They 
seemed to have grounds for their belief. Thou- 
sands wallow in the bog of uncleanness, self-loath- 
ing, despair, and crime, because this powerful in- 
stinct in them is perverted. The life of the per- 
vert is like a sixty-horsepower motor driven by 
a drunken chauffeur. 

"Dante, with his Beatrice, showed us a better 
way. So also Tennyson and all the nobler poets. 

"The art of nobleness consists in changing 
what is coarse into that which is fine, making what 
is common to be beautiful and strange; this can 
only be done by the spirit in man. 

"When eating becomes communion, when wash- 
ing becomes baptism, and when man-woman love 
becomes marriage, then they are sacraments, and 
life becomes sacramental and is raised from ani- 
mality to high and divine level. 

"Where there is nothing any more that is sac- 
rament to man, then life sinks to the stage in 
which it was in the days of Augustus in Rome, 
which Matthew Arnold described: 

"On that hard pagan world disgust 
And secret loathing fell; 
Deep weariness and sated lust 
Made human life a hell." 

io8 



THE CAGE 

A GIRAFFE in the Paris Zoo has broken his head 
against the bars of his cage. What ailed the 
beast? For seventeen years he has had plenty 
of fodder and drink, an attendant in uniform and 
gold lace to wait on him, and the privilege of 
making the crowd gape. It was a career each 
of us is dying for. It would seem that Mr. Gi- 
raffe was hard to please. 

When you go to a circus you see not only the 
caged brutes in the menagerie, but around the 
sawdust ring you find little wooden-fenced inclo- 
sures; in these sit the elect. Similar cages are at 
the prize fight, the roof garden, and the horse 
show. Nobody is It unless he has a fence around 
him. 

Then there are the boxes at the theatre, the 
very worst places in the house from which to see 
what is going on upon the stage. But when you 
put a barrier around the poorest seats you can 
charge for them three times the price of good 
seats. 

The only reason we want money is that we may 
buy a cage. As soon as a man gets rich he pro- 
cures a house with a yard and a high iron fence 

109 



around it. If a visitor enters the yard and gets 
by the bulldog he still has difficulty in breaking 
into the mansion. A butler meets him at the 
door to see if his clothes look fit, and a secre- 
tary meets him in the hall to make sure he is not 
after money. 

When a woman acquires money her one desire 
also is to find a cage. She yearns for exclusive- 
ness. Her altitude in the social scale is measured 
by the number of persons she will not speak to. 

What we call getting up in the world amounts 
to getting properly caged. We want to travel in 
a private car — at least, in a private compartment. 
We want our meals at the hotel served in our 
own private dining room. We want to be shaved 
by our own private valet and not in the barber 
shop. Anything to be caged off from the people. 

The instinct is in us from the first. Turn a 
child loose in a garden. What birds and insects 
he cannot kill he captures and wants to cage. 

When we say a woman loves birds we mean 
she has one or more poor little wild things hang- 
ing in cages around the house. 

You may find here and there a squirrel in a 
cage; to give him exercise and to amuse him an 
infernal wheeled grill has been arranged in which 
the captive travels miles; he doubtless enjoys it 
— about as much as you would enjoy a treadmill; 
his mistress "loves animals." 

Meanwhile there remain a few souls who really 
love freedom. They decline to "belong" to all 

no 



sorts of things. They refuse to be bound by 
convention and the opinions of other people. 
They don't want to get away from the common 
people, but to know and love them better. They 
love flowers and have no desire to pick them. 
They love birds — in trees and hedgerows. They 
love wild beasts — in the woods, and have no de- 
sire to see them pacing up and down in cages. 
They want to be free, free, free. And they want 
all other people to be free. 

Some of these are tramps. Some are the caged 
captives of convention sighing through the bars. 
Some are poets, like Whitman, crying: 

"I utter my barbaric yawp over the roofs of 
the world." 



Ill 



THE BLESSING 

In the days of our youth the family never sat 
down to the table without the blessing. All heads 
would be bowed, and all the clatter of child- 
voices would hush, while father would say: 

"For what we are about to receive, O Lord, 
make us truly grateful. Amen." 

Alas! the blessing is gone. Nobody gets up 
to breakfast, or the affair is a "movable feast," 
where one at a time the people appear, snatch a 
bite and a sup and hurry away. 

There are even many who have their coffee 
and rolls while lying abed; of which custom let 
us say nothing. 

City people eat their midday meal downtown 
in restaurant or club, where, of course, there is 
no room for blessing — quite the contrary. 

The family usually gathers at dinner, but In 
how many households do they fall to, like un- 
souled animals, without one word of grace to 
redeem the crassness of feeding? 

I hold it is not a matter of belonging to a 
church, believing a creed, or professing to be pi- 
ous, but that it is an act of decency, and of hu- 
man dignity, and of that spiritual self-respect 
all souls ought to have to say grace. 

112 



Adopt the custom in your household. Let there 
be at least one minute in the day when, as a fam- 
ily, officially and ritually, you seriously recognize 
that you are children of the infinite, pensioners 
upon the bounty of "a power not of yourselves." 

Don't let your peculiar theology, or lack of 
it, hinder you from a sweet and wholesome cere- 
mony that may light up a sordid day with a lit- 
tle beam of the Sun of souls. 

One family I know used to sing the blessing; 
and who, whether Jew, Buddhist, Christian, or 
agnostic, could be anything but bettered by join- 
ing for a moment, before eating, in this hymn? 

"Be present at our table, Lord; 
Be here as everywhere adored; 
Feed us with bread, and grant that we 
May feast in paradise with Thee!" 

If that sounds too churchly, say the quaint 
"Selkirk Grace," once used by Bobby Burns : 

"Some hae meat and canna eat, 
And some wad eat that want it, 
But we hae meat, and we can eat, 
And sae the Lord be thanket!" 

Think! Here we all are, fellow travellers, 
upon "the good ship Earth," whirling through 
starry ways. We know not whence we came nor 
whither we go. We know not our appointed 
time. There is some power, some mind, in the 
sum of things, that has all these secrets. 

113 



Eating should be the sacrament indicative of 
our reasonable reverence for that Supreme Guid- 
ing Spirit. 

Say this grace of Robert Louis Stevenson, lib- 
eral enough for all, to whatever power you be- 
lieve in: 

"Help us to repay in service one to another 
the debt of Thine unmerited benefits and mer- 
cies." 



114 



THE CITY AND PRIVACY 

One reason why people flock to cities is that 
they may be able to mind their own business. 

Political economists seek complex and devious 
reasons for the tremendous rapidity of city 
growth and for the desertion of the country and 
of the country town. The cause, however, is 
quite simple, as simple as human nature. The 
people go to cities because they "want to." That's 
all. 

Take the village of Podunk. In the first place 
you would not be allowed to go there to live 
without explaining why you came, where you 
came from, and what your business is. You can 
rent a flat in Chicago, however, and nobody cares 
a tuppence who you are or what is your criminal 
record, so long as you are peaceable. 

If you do business in Podunk, and usually get 
down to the store at nine, and some morning 
you do not appear until ten, the town will not 
rest until it has found out the cause of your delay. 

Your neighbors know all about you and your 
wife, your sons, and your daughters. The bank 
cashier knows the size of your pile, the grocer 
and butcher know what you eat, the dry goods 

115 



merchant knows what sort of underclothes you 
wear and how much your women folks spend on 
corsets, and they all meet and check up. 

When you leave town they know it, also when 
you return; and they want to know what you 
were doing in St. Louis. 

It is all a very cosy family arrangement. You 
live in the constant glare of the limelight. 

Some people like it, and feel lost and lone- 
some in the city. But more and more that class 
is growing to whom this perpetual invasion of 
privacy is disagreeable. 

It is pretty generally assumed among moral- 
ists that people love the privacy of cities because 
they wish to plunge into vice. Doubtless some 
do. But it is doubtful if the average city-bred 
person is any more immoral than the country- 
bred. 

It is conceivable that a person may wish to 
live his own life as he pleases, and not under the 
unremitting supervision of Mrs. Grundy, ,and 
that this wish may be prompted not by a desire 
for secret crime but simply by a desire for per- 
sonal privacy. 

The matter is really a conflict between the old 
idea that morality is conformity and the modern 
idea that morality is the responsible expression 
of one's own personality. 

The city means the revolt of the soul of man 
against moral dictation. Of course, wicked peo- 

ii6 



pie have always resented moral tyranny. Now 
the good people are beginning to resent it too. 
So the country is squeezing out its best and its 
worst into the cities. 



117 



A WEALTHY MAN 

I have received a remarkable letter. It is so 
significant that I am going to give the greater 
part of it, amended a bit, to my readers. 

Here is a man, it seems to me, who has got 
himself on the right side of the universe. He 
is so rich he makes me ashamed of my poverty. 
He writes : 

"I am very wealthy. 

"Although you will look in vain for my name 
in 'Who's Who' or the society 'Blue Book,' never- 
theless all the art treasures of Mr. Morgan or 
Mr. Altman are trifles compared to my posses- 
sions. 

"As I write I glance at one of them in rapt ad- 
miration and wonder. It is an inexhaustible 
source of delight to me. Its gifts to me are so 
prolific that I can trample them under foot, yet 
still they come. 

"My gems are beyond price. The pleasure 
they supply to me is unalloyed, for they give me 
no worry along with their enjoyment. I have 
no fear of burglars. Whoso would rob me would 
but enrich me further. 

"All this vast wealth is confined within the 

11$ 



small area of a few hundred feet of the earth's 
surface, a portion of ground for which I have 
toiled the greater part of my fifty years of life. 

"The thing of beauty I refer to is a noble 
Sugar Maple Tree about sixty or seventy feet 
high, in all the glory of its autumnal foliage. 

"To-day it is vermilion and green and gold in 
the sunlight after a drenching rain. 

"Every leaf is a jewel, and every one different, 
thousands upon thousands of them. No rare 
enamels can compare with them. They shame 
the porcelains of China, the vases of Japan, the 
king's treasures from Dresden or Sevres. 

"The delicate tracery, the fantastic shapes, the 
tumult of color in these leaves! They are full 
of the craftsmanship-joy, the artist-delight, of the 
infinite Creator. I feel by the joy I get in appre- 
ciating them what joy He must Have in making 
them. 

"They are falling one by one, and lie in 
splotches of rich color upon the green of the 
grass, which flashes with raindrops in all the hues 
of the prism, a carpet of oriental colors upon 
a background of diamonds. 

"And when all the leaves have returned to the 
earth from which they came, where they will help 
to fertilize new lives, I will still have my Tree 
to admire. Its beautiful naked limbs will be 
etched against the sky, its rugged bark upon its 
sturdy trunk will hide the inner secret of life to 
come. 

119 



"I get rest from my Tree, and high thoughts, 
and winged fancies, which I cannot utter. 

"I see two things in my Maple, the two things 
which speak to my soul, and whisper to me the 
secret of the world and of the world to come, and 
of all worthy living. 

"The two things are Strength and Beauty." 



1 20 



THE FIREPLACE 

In the modern dwelling the fireplace has dis- 
appeared, the steam radiator has been substi- 
tuted. 

The change is not without significance to the 
spirits of men. The fire on the hearth was the 
symbol of The Family. It was the original al- 
tar, the centre about which gathered the first hu- 
man institution. 

In the advance ranks of "progress" The Fam- 
ily is likewise vanishing. A certain group of fu- 
turist thinkers, typified by H. G. Wells, seriously 
propose the State instead of The Family as the 
proper agent to care for children. 

We move from flat to flat, like gypsies. Our 
children are born at stations by the way, and have 
no home feeling. 

Divorces increase; for women are travelling 
companions, not home makers. 

By our most praiseworthy charities we are un- 
dermining The Family. By many of those 
schemes, both of Church and State, by which we 
seek to "save" the individual, we try to do what 
ought to be done through The Family. 

Old ladies are put into institutional homes, 

121 



often, when it is the duty and the blessing of The 
Family to keep them. 

The children of the well-to-do, who ought to 
be growing up in daily contact with mother, fa- 
ther, brothers, and sisters, are sent away to pri- 
vate schools. They may get expert training, but 
they miss that family life that is Infinitely more 
valuable to them, and equally as necessary to the 
parents. 

Babies will be taken care of by hospitals, found- 
ling asylums, and other charitable institutions, 
provided the mother will renounce all claim to her 
offspring. 

We heal defective souls and bodies and rescue 
the perishing generally, but we insist upon sup- 
pressing the function of The Family. The mother 
is incompetent, the father unfit, the environment 
is unideal; hence, take the child away to a huge 
brick barracks where he can be herded scientifi- 
cally with other children. 

Rational helpfulness should aid the defective 
individual by aiding The Family. For The Fam- 
ily is more important than the individual. 

It is more to be desired that we maintain The 
Family than that we preserve the Nation or the 
Church. 

Without Family life we are what Urbain Go- 
hler calls "une poussiere de peuples," a dust-peo- 
ple, loose grains of sand, with no solidarity. 

The "live your own life" gospel Is often dan- 
gerously near humbuggery. Every young man 

122 



and young woman should plan to have children, 
born in happy marriage, growing up in an atmos- 
phere of Family love ; for there is nothing that so 
develops one's soul as the responsibilities, the joys, 
and sorrows of The Family. 

We need a deal of wholesome human feeling 
to resist the entirely corrupting influence of arti- 
ficial mantels over artificial grates where there is 
no fire, or at least but a gas log, and of radiators, 
and of registers, holes in the floors where hot air 
comes up. Would that there were some way to 
gather The Family once more around blazing 
logs and a hearthstone! 

For the most beautiful cross in the world is 
composed of two sticks crossed and burning in the 
fireplace, with father, mother, and the children all 
gathered around it. 

The Family is the first spiritual unit of man- 
kind, the real Church, "and the gates of hell shall 
not prevail against it." 



123 



THE SAND PILE 

Some men the other day came around and 
dumped about forty wagon loads of sand in the 
street at our corner. They are going to use it 
in repaying the street; but meanwhile it is being 
put to a far better use. 

For, as soon as the heap was complete, out 
from all sorts of places came small children and 
covered the sand heap, even as flies come and 
cover a lump of sugar. 

I can see them out of my window now, and 
hear them; for they are shrieking like mad, as 
all children do who are having a perfectly gor- 
geous time. 

If I could tell you all that is happening on that 
sand it would make more interesting reading than 
a pageful of newspaper crimes or a bookful of 
Diamond Dick adventures. 

Over there a pirate has captured a crew of 
merchantmen and made them walk the plank. 
One by one the poor wretches tumbled down the 
sand, while the bold Captain Kidd with his sword 
of lath stood mercilessly at the top. 

A general has led his troops to glory. He is an 
Irish boy of seven; his army consists of his two 

124 



sisters and two neighbor boys. But it was a 
famous victory. They hked it so well they did it 
over and over. 

There have been knife fights on the cliff, terrific 
struggles with the Indians, bloody hold-ups, prize 
fights, and bear fights. 

Little Sissy Matthews, aged three, has rolled 
down the sand mountain until she is half sand 
herself; and her soul is filled with pure joy, even 
as her ears are filled with sand. 

They have dug holes, moulded forts, made 
houses, pierced tunnels. They have patted the 
sand and piled it and thrown it and rolled in it, 
everything but eaten it. 

On behalf of the children I wish to thank the 
municipality for its kind consideration. Whether 
the street needs paving or not I will not undertake 
to discuss, but it is certain that the children need 
all the laughter and glee that is contained in that 
sand pile. 

Therefore, O wise and learned rulers of the 
town, I would petition you to come on with the 
sand. Please make some more heaps. Dump 
one at every corner. 

It is good of you to provide schools where the 
little ones can sit up straight and study and not 
whisper. But oh ! how much more bliss and rap- 
ture in a hill of sand! 

All day long thousands of children stay in 
their cooped-up flats, or go out to play in streets 
crowded with murderous automobiles and trucks. 

125 



So that a sand pile is a godsend, and goes toward 
realizing the prophecy of the seer of old: 

"And the streets of the city shall be full of boys 
and girls playing in the streets thereof." 



iz6 



MUSIC 

The study of music should be made compul- 
sory in the public schools. 

The whole populace should be taught what true 
music is. The only way to accomplish this is to 
cause the children continually to hear, to sing, 
and to perform upon instruments music of the 
highest quality. 

Cheap and nasty music is worse than cheap and 
nasty meat and bread; the former destroys the 
character, the latter only the body. 

The average popular music of America to-day 
is without doubt the most base and evil ever in the 
world. It is without ingenuity, taste, or musical 
value. It is as injurious as profanity. The 
wretched tunes are more deleterious than the 
smut-words to which they are set. 

A generation of boys and girls brought up on 
Bach, Beethoven, Gounod, and Wagner would 
have souls lOO per cent, higher in quality than the 
unfortunate children of to-day fed upon ragtime 
and melodies of contemptible inanity. 

The greatest danger threatening this nation is 
that it may become utterly material and trivial; 
for triviality invariably accompanies materialism 
and the decay of ideals. 

127 



A nation that has no deep-hearted songs, a na- 
tion that can not or will not sing, can be no or- 
ganic thing; it is but loose dust. 

The most terrible trait of the laborers of the 
United States is not their violence nor their drink, 
but the fact that they do not sing at their meet- 
ings. 

Cultured and well-to-do people have a tendency 
to perversion and idle mischief because there is 
no music in them. Who ever heard of a fash- 
ionable "function" where the guests sang choruses 
and part-songs? 

Our people are educated to have music made 
At them, not to make music themselves ; a fatal, 
deadly mistake. 

The American cabaret is a ghastly and, to an 
intelligent person, a most boresome affair. Watch 
the hideous, wriggling women and jumping males 
trying to entertain the eaters and drinkers, who 
sit with stolid, cheerless faces! 

A company of German students in a beer cellar 
is jovial, because they can sing, and sing music 
that has worth. 

Not the least reason why the church is losing 
its hold upon the masses is that congregations 
have ceased to sing. A company of worshippers 
that hire their music to be performed before them 
is already dead. 

There can be no civic conscience, no clean poli- 
tics, no firm organization of the people, without 
music as a basis. Those who cannot sing together 

128 



cannot act together for high spiritual and political 
ends. 

Music is not an entertainment, an accomplish- 
ment, a side-show. 

It is as necessary for the populace to have 
music as they march toward their civic and na- 
tional goals as it is for an army to have bands 
or to chant folk-hymns on its way to battle. 

A dumb democracy is a dead one. 

We are the dumb slaves of such organizations 
as Tammany because we do not sing; for those 
who have no music in their souls cannot keep step. 

Why quarrel over teaching religion in the pub- 
lic schools? Why not teach music, which is the 
gist of all religions? "It is incontestable," says 
M. Victor de Laprade, a French writer on music, 
"that music induces in us a sense of the infinite 
and the contemplation of the invisible." 

"See deep enough," says Carlyle, "and you see 
musically; the heart of Nature being everywhere 
music." 

And William Watson : 

Nay, what is Nature's 
Self, but an endless 
Strife towards music, 
Euphony, rhyme? 

We must learn as a people to love good music, 
or we shall perish of sheer cheapness and shal- 
lowness of soul. 

129 



NO NEED OF CHARM 

In "The Marriage Game," Mrs. Flexner's 
play, occurs a fine line : 

"Unless a woman wants something she has no 
business to want, she has no need of charm." 

No need of charm! How many a foolish lit- 
tle brain, devoid of understanding, has ship- 
wrecked things by this unreason! 

The silly woman, who exerted all her arts and 
wiles to draw a suitor, drops her efforts with him 
become a husband. Her market's made. She has 
caught her train, is safely aboard, and why run 
any more? 

She gives frank expression to her peevish 
whims and ailments. She is captious, critical. 

She is dowdy at breakfast. She is unkempt 
and sloppily dressed when they two are alone. 

Exert one's self to woo a husband? Why, 
there are those women who seem to think it's 
hardly decent. 

And right here is the cue for the entrance of 
"the other woman." 

Many a man, too, thinks the game's up when 
he has haltered and altared the woman of his 
choice. The excitement of the chase is over. It's 
"married and done for." 

130 



Then if the woman be strongly human, as she 
generally is, and a bit weak and sensitive, as she 
often is, marriage breaks down. Possibly — en- 
ter "the other man." 

People speak of having tried marriage and 
found it a failure. Most of them have not tried 
at all. That is the trouble. They didn't "try." 

Eternal vigilance is the price of love, as well as 
of liberty. Success, in marriage also, means keep- 
ing everlastingly at it. 

To sit down, once married, and expect to be 
coddled, waited on, served, and pleased, you a 
king on a throne and your mate your servitor, is 
rather sure to bring on swift ruin. 

There is not one wife in a thousand that could 
not keep her husband if she would keep working 
at the job. The wife has a thousand advantages 
over the other woman. 

And if a husband will only not stop making 
love he need fear no rival. 

Most of the unhappy marriages are due to self- 
ishness plus pure boneheadedness. 

The love and devotion of a good woman, and 
of an honest man, is worth working hard for. 

And the beauty of it is that it is the most de- 
lightful work in the world, once it gets established 
as a habit. 

You need charm every day you live. 



m 



THE PRACTICE OF GREATNESS BY 
WORDS 

You take exercises for the muscles of your 
arms, legs, and back; why not take an exercise 
occasionally for your soul? 

Your spirit, or ego, or self, or whatever you 
may call that inner invisible something that is 
more really you than your body; that something 
which thinks, loves, feels, imagines, and wills is 
well worth a little training. 

Here is a suggestion. There are certain great 
ideas, represented by certain great words. These 
words have power-volts in their very sound. 
Every time you think one of them you grow 
greater. 

Take to bed with you the following seven 
words. As you lie, waiting for sleep, say them 
over, one by one, to yourself. 

Or, better, take a half hour during the day, In 
silence and solitude, and practise the feeling of 
these terms. 

God. Never mind about your belief or disbe- 
lief. Say that word ten times, slowly, with pauses 
between. Think of what is above, below, around, 
and in all things. Spread your mind out upon the 
yniverse. Practise the sensing of the infinite. 

13? 



I^TARS. Say Stars. Think iStars. Try i6 
reach the feeling of stars. Let your fancy climb 
to the top of the night sky. Get the vibrations 
of those measureless distances, those suns, gal- 
axies, sweeping worlds; all silent, luminous, im- 
mense, swift whirling yet orderly. Happy you 
if you can induce a bit of star feeling within you I 

Mountain. Repeat some names of individu- 
als; Mont Blanc, Himalaya, Orizaba, Matter- 
horn, Popocatepetl. Get your mind up among the 
noiseless heights. Let the serenity, the eternity 
of the words filter Into you. 

Ocean. Go a-sailing, out of sight of land. 
Be surrounded for a moment by waste, wild wa- 
ters. See on all sides only horizon. Stand, in 
your imagination, by the seashore. Hear the surf 
boom. Do not talk. Do not make phrases. 
Feel! 

Tree. Call to mind the most majestic tree you 
know. Touch its rough trunk. Look up at its 
wide branches. Stand from it and see Its outline 
against the sky. Get some of the Tree feeling 
into your spirit. Think Trees ; it's a wonderful 
relief from thinking dishes and dust-rags. 

Dawn. Think of sunrise, of the freshness of 
life, of hopeful beginnings. Induce, if you can, 
a sense of sunrise. 

More. It Is a sonorous word. Repeat it — 
slowly, significantly, and note how you grow. The 
word lifts you up, expands you. 

Don't try to argue. Just say these seven words. 

133 



Let them boom across your consciousness. Some- 
how they will still and banish your littleness. 
You will come to a great calm. You will have a 
sense of poise. You will get a sense of remote- 
ness from affairs. You cannot describe it, nor 
impart it. It is a secret. 

Your self-contempt will vanish. You will cease 
to think yourself a nothing, a puppet, insignificant. 

You will feel that you are, deep in your hid- 
den life, great and strong and wonderful. For 
who can think such thoughts and be wholly little 
and contemptible? 



134 



WHAT WE CAN NEVER KNOW 

The most striking thing about a really learned 
man is not the extent of his knowledge, but the 
extent of his admitted ignorance. The wiser a 
person is the greater the number of things he 
doesn't know. 

The more universally cock-sure and well in- 
formed one seems the more likely it is that he is 
a humbug. 

Socrates . . . 

Whom well inspir'd the oracle pronounced 

Wisest of men, 

used often to say he knew nothing. 

How little has science made inroad upon that 
stupendous and limitless nescience that surrounds 
it, as the stellar universe enfolds the tiny earth! 

Sir Oliver Lodge the other day, at the meet- 
ing of the British Association, spoke of the mys- 
tery of sex determination. Spite of all claims, 
we know little more to-day than did the cave 
men why one child is born a boy and another a 
girl, and why the world ratio keeps about the 
same. 

135 



Sir Oliver also expressed his wonder that some 
plants bore both male and female flowers. He 
said the same sap comes into the stem, but just 
at that junction where differently sexed flowers 
branched away from each other there must be 
some profound change in the sap. 

"I don't know what it is, and microscopes tell 
me nothing about it," he continued. "Perhaps 
if physiologists could find out just what happens 
in that little plant joint they would get some clue 
to the reason why some human beings are born 
boys and others girls." 

He might have pushed further his point of 
wonder. How comes it that the earth juices make 
here a white flower and there a red? How is a 
huge oak all folded in a little acorn? 

How can nature make the peach, full of juice 
and cased so closely in the thinnest of fuzzy skin 
that never leaks ? 

How does blood food here create a hard finger- 
nail, there a hair, and there a stony tooth? 

What is electricity? We know somewhat of 
how it acts. But what is it? We know little 
more of it than does a savage. 

What is life? What is that secret force that 
transforms in a trice a living dog, who eats his 
environment, into a dead dog, whose environment 
eats him? 

What is love? Why does this woman thrill 
you and that one leave you cold or repel you? 

What h conscience, that world's policeman that 



urges us on to what we think right and affrights 
us at what we think wrong? 

What is truth? What is personality? What 
is being? 

And these questions are not remote, academic 
questions, not such things as Huxley called "lunar 
politics," but they touch the very nearest and 
dearest regions of every man's life. 

We are but dust-motes in the sunbeam of the 
infinite. We cling like oysters to our little point 
in the bed of the vast ocean of mystery. 

All about us is nature, deep-wombed, gray-eyed, 
her mind a galaxy of secrets, her thoughts far 
and strange as the procession of the suns. 

Nothing befits us, her children, so much as rev- 
erence for her purposes, humility before her great 
brain, trust and love in her vast heart. 

No one is so consummate an ass as the one 
who thinks he knows it all. 



1.37 



"AND NO ONE SHALL WORK FOR 

MONEY" 

It is usually put forth as a knockdown argu- 
ment that if men did not have to work for bread 
and butter they would not work at all. 

It is assumed as a matter of course that money 
is the representative of the only universal mo- 
tive of human energy, and that if all were assured 
a good living nobody would turn a hand. 

I do not believe this. I believe that money is 
not a legitimate motive at all. To illustrate, let 
us imagine that state of the world, to which we 
will come some day, where wages exist no more. 

Let us suppose we have so developed the state 
that every child is assured of care and due train- 
ing. No ignorant, unskilled, or criminally de- 
fective beings are brought into the number of in- 
dependent adults. If incapable of decent life on 
arriving at manhood they are taken care of in 
proper institutions. 

Let us suppose also that every person Is fed, 
housed, and clothed by the state. No man or 
woman needs to labor to make a living. The en- 
tire motive of subsistence is eliminated. 

Instead of this resulting in the paralysis of all 

138 



energy, it would be but the beginning of prog- 
ress. As Moryd Sheridan says : "When our ex- 
istence is comfortably assured, the battle of life 
will have begun in earnest." 

Men, with their present stock of ideals, would 
of course drop into idleness under such circum- 
stances ; but men now differ from men then almost 
as much as a hog differs from a man. It is frankly 
to be admitted that altruistic feelings and civic 
conscience must be greatly strengthened. Condi- 
tions now are the only practical ones for half- 
barbarous creatures such as we are at present. 

But let us be specific. What motives precisely 
will supersede personal gain? 

Instead of work for money there will be crafts- 
manship for the joy of it. People now love to 
make, do, and manage things, for fun, when the 
things are what they enjoy doing. The problem 
of civilization is to change labor into craft, and 
thus into play. 

Machinery is more and more replacing the 
drudgery of hands. The steam dredger does the 
work of a hundred hand shovels ; carry that on a 
hundred years and imagine the vast amount of 
disagreeable effort that will be taken from men. 

There will be the enthusiasms of art, of music, 
of letters and science. Even now the best work 
here is not at all for money and is poorly paid. 

The joy of home making is not a money-paid 
pleasure. The wives and mothers of the future 
will be as busy and as happy as now. 

139 



We are all sensitive to public opinion. The 
scorn of our fellows is a sharp whip. As we pro- 
gress it will grow sharper. Men will be 
Ashamed to Be Idle. Human beings work as 
hard to avoid contempt as to get money. To 
have the esteem and praise of the community will 
move men as powerfully as to make gain. 

In a wage-free democracy we shall not only 
have better poems and paintings and scientific dis- 
coveries and music, but street cars will be run bet- 
ter, groceries and milk will be of better quality 
and better distributed, meals will be better cooked, 
clothes will be better made, and all the little, nec- 
essary work of the world better done, because al- 
ways a large part of the people can do these 
things and cannot write poetry nor compose music. 

You remember Tom Sawyer's getting the boys 
to whitewash his fence, when he made it Seem 
Fun to them? 

That is plain human nature. And I believe all 
men will do more and better work when they shall 
work because it is fun to them, and when not to 
work will only mean the contempt of their fel- 
lows. 

And, take it now, the people who never have to 
care for bread or clothing are about as ener- 
getic as the farm-hands, with, of course, notable 
exceptions among the perverts of society and of 
"society's" hangers on. 



140 



THE SCHOOL YARD 

Few greater wrongs can be done an American 
child than to deprive him of the privilege of the 
Public School. 

I am not so sure children get much training in 
the schoolhouse that really trains, for we are 
still monstrously medieval with our "grades," 
"courses of study," and "examinations," classify- 
ing human beings like cabbages, pigeon-holing 
them and working them through systems as if 
they were scientijfic specimens, instead of study- 
ing them and developing the singular talent in 
each of them. 

But there is no doubt as to the educational value 
of the school playground. It is there that your 
little darling will learn that one thing he needs 
to know above and before all other things, to wit : 
Democracy. 

It is there he will get the self-conceit punched 
out of him. He will learn to play the man. He 
will learn self-reliance, courage, and "not to think 
more highly of himself than he ought to think." 

Children, even the offspring of snobs and snob- 
esses, are natural born democrats. They know 
no distinction of race, creed, or social position. 



Your child will play with the little Chinese boy 
and never dream he is not a perfectly good hu- 
man being until you teach him. 

Sir Francis Vane of Hutton, in the September 
number of the Contemporary Review, tells how, 
when he had established a school in the Trans- 
vaal, the little whites and blacks studied and 
sported together in entire good will, until the 
Dutch parents begged him as a favor not to al- 
low their children to play with colored ones. 

He continues : "I have seen this fight of the 
young for freedom from race and caste prejudice, 
against elderly sinners — the laggards of time — 
not in one country, but in many. In Italy on the 
democratic sands of Viareggio, where Shelley 
died, I have seen little people playing in harmony 
together, and suddenly separated by those whose 
duty it was to instil wisdom and Christianity into 
them with these words : 'I will not have you play 
with Protestant children.' I have seen at San 
Sebastian children educated in the vulgarity of 
class prejudice just as I have in race; and I can 
never forget my own first experience in this kind 
of stupid cruelty, when as a child of nine I had 
played with a small girl of the same age one long 
morning, and she, having been invited to our 
house to dinner, to my surprise and mortification 
was sent to the kitchen for her meal while I had 
mine in solitary state in the day nursery. To my 
vehement inquiry why we should be divided, the 
governess's reply was, 'But you are a little gen- 

142 



tleman' — a poor and inexplicable consolation for 
having my food alone I" 

For some time to come, doubtless, grown- 
ups will continue their vulgar, Pharisaic, and sep- 
tic notions and practices of class prejudice; but 
something should be done to save the little ones. 

Parents should realize that no more danger- 
ous idea can get itself fixed in the child mind than 
that he is of a class apart from and superior to 
ordinary people; or that there are insuperable 
barriers between high-born and low-born, rich 
and poor, white and yellow, Hebrew and Chris- 
tian. 

Georg Ebers describes a saint in Mount Sinai 
who crawled into a hole, away from the wicked 
world, but when they found him dead they found 
also that he had written upon the wall that fa- 
mous line of Terence, "Homo sum; humani nihil 
a me alien puto." (I am a man, and I consider 
nothing human alien to me.) 

No institution for thfe inculcation of the sense 
of humanity has ever been devised that is better 
than the United States public school yard. 



143 



THE CURSE OF POVERTY 

There is but one calamity — poverty. There 
is but one thing to be desired — riches. 

Any kind of poverty is bad: material, intellec- 
tual, emotional, spiritual. 

Every bodily disease is due to bodily poverty: 
of the blood, of nutrition, of elimination, of co- 
ordination. 

Malignant germs abound everywhere. But 
they are snobs. They do not attack the rich- 
blooded, the richly functioned; they pounce upon 
the anemic. A health-rich boy can have a mil- 
lion pneumonia microbes in his mouth and not be 
hurt. 

Money poverty is bad. You do not have to be 
a money worshipper to believe that you cannot 
lead a decent life without income enough to get 
you comfortable clothing, wholesome food, a san- 
itary habitation, and the saving bits of culture 
and leisure. 

It is perfectly right for us to want money 
enough to secure a reasonable independence. 
Any one who is not investing regularly a portion 
of his earnings is a fool. Thrift is just as sterling 
a virtue now as it was in the days of Ben Frank- 

144 



lin. Any child not trained to save is wronged. 

The newspapers are full of the news of do- 
mestic scandal. It is due to poverty of love, and 
poverty of character. 

The richest rich people on earth are they who 
have plenty of love. 

And how terrible and far-reaching are the ef- 
fects of mind poverty! 

The people are like "dumb, driven cattle," 
herded by shrewd political bosses. Their chil- 
dren are stunted, their homes are cramped, their 
rights are denied them, their food is poisoned, 
they are insulted, despised, pillaged, and swin- 
dled, simply because they are ignorant, they are 
victims of intellectual poverty, they don't know 
what to do. 

Duly train just one generation of children and 
see what a tremendous silent revolution would 
ensue ! 

It is the great army of the ignorant who stir 
up violence, follow fatuous enthusiasms and bring 
defeat in the battles of the people. 

It is the moral poverty of the money-rich that 
renders them pests. 

It is the spiritual poverty of the Church that 
makes it ineffective. 

It is the artistic poverty of the People that 
gives us ugly cities, dreary streets, stuffy flats, 
hideous advertising plastered over street cars and 
billboards. 

It is artistic poverty that produces poor theat- 

145 



rical shows, wretched, musically poverty-stricken 
comic operas, idea-poverty-stricken plays. 

It is moral impotence that causes the dearth 
of honest men as great leaders. 

Yet reformers h,awk preventive remedies. 
Prohibit this, stop that, curb the other! Hu- 
manity needs the bit, the brake, and the restraint 
of its too powerful forces ! 

Stuff and nonsense! The one thing mankind 
needs is more force, more fire, more steam, more 
riches. 

Never more than now. Democracy needs a 
thousandfold more money than royalty. Free- 
dom needs more brains than serfdom. Virtue 
needs more energy than vice. Love is aseptic in 
proportion as it is potent. Real religion is only 
in surcharged souls; watery and timid souls can 
have but Pharisaism. 

Give us riches ! Rich hearts to love might- 
ily, rich brains to think boldly, rich hands to work 
skilfully, rich bodies to live wholesomely, riches 
of culture to keep us out of the bogs of barbar- 
ism, riches of music, of sculpture, of architecture, 
riches of spirit to grasp the majesty of moral 
laws, and riches of money to secure our personal 
independence. 

The great man is the man of full life. 

"And he shall be like a tree planted by the 
rivers of water, that bringeth forth fruit; his leaf 
also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth 
shall prosper." 

146 



WHAT IS BEST? 

What is the best? We all agree we should 
strive for it, but what is it? Christians say the 
answer is found in the Bible, Mahometans in the 
Koran, some say it is in the theories of Herbert 
Spencer, others of Descartes. 

These have been given as "the greatest good" : 
righteousness, happiness, wisdom, love, holiness, 
and so on. 

My own notion is that "the best" is whatever 
favors the fullest development of the personality. 
I believe we are set in this garden of the world 
to grow, and that he who grows most perfectly 
is the best man. 

There are in us sensual, selfish, and other so- 
called "evil" qualities, and others called "higher" 
elements or "good." What is the difference? 

The evil elements are those which the experi- 
ence of the race has shown to be destructive, their 
pleasure is brief; the higher are those proven to be 
both lasting in themselves and preservative and 
strengthening to the whole man. 

Over the individual man is mankind. From 
this comes a still truer fact. Whatever is hostile 
to the full development and permanent order, 

147 



health, and joy of the whole race becomes a "bad" 
thing for the single person; and whatever pro- 
motes the welfare of humanity is a "good" in the 
one man. 

From this comes what we call morality, which 
is the limiting of the individual self-expression by 
the collective. I may have an impulse to glutton- 
ize, steal, or kill; if I and all others freely in- 
dulged such promptings the race would be imper- 
illed; hence they are "wicked." 

The moralities therefore are not the inven- 
tions of priests, are not forms of tyranny. No 
man nor conspiracy could establish a fake or ar- 
tificial system of ethics which will stand the test 
of time. For morals are the feeling of self-pres- 
ervation in the race, superimposed upon the feel- 
ing of self-expression in the individual. 

The great "law-givers" never "gave" laws at 
all. They discovered them. They were poets, 
seers. Moses discovered the Ten Command- 
ments ; he perceived them to be the real principles 
of racial self-preservation. Socrates, Buddha, 
Confucius and all the sages merely saw vast race- 
principles and gave them to us as correctives of 
individual forces. 

Let us go back to our definition, "the best is 
whatever favors the fullest growth of the person- 
ality," and ask how we may know what this is. 
The answer is, by experience, not only individual 
experience, but the experience of the whole world. 

148 



The latter is stored in our conscience, cellared in 
our inborn sense of right and wrong. 

The man who pursues only self-expression, and 
gives self up to sensual, intellectual, or spiritual 
self-indulgence, is a dangerous man. He is surely 
headed for tragedy. 

But the man who, while freely indulging every 
instinct, every desire, yet feels in himself a race- 
consciousness that controls his private impulses, 
such a man is truly altruistic. 

When altruism becomes a passion we call it re- 
ligion. 

Thus, then, we may know what is "best." First, 
it is whatever in us seeks expression, it is the 
forthputting of our personality. And second, it 
Is the world-consciousness, more or less mani- 
fested in love, patriotism, God, and all inclusive 
race-passions, guiding and fostering our individ- 
ual desires. 

I know that hope, faith, courage, and chaste- 
mindedness are good because I feel that if all the 
world practised them it would be well. I know 
that fear, pride, petulance, greed, and such things 
are bad, because if everybody were governed by 
such emotions it would produce chaos and univer- 
sal unhappiness. This is practically Kant's "cate- 
gorical imperative." It Is a simple, understand- 
able means of deciding by common-sense, and not 
by authority nor hearsay, what is "best." 



149 



A CHRISTMAS CARD 

My Dear Friend — Christmas is coming, the 
great human festival. It is making me realize as 
it approaches that the best possessions I have 
been able to get from life are my friendships. 

I want to give something to my friends. 

The other night, after thinking it all over, I 
was surprised by the old truth, which came 
strongly to me, that what friends want most is 
to know we think of them and love them. 

Therefore I am going just to tell you I think 
of you, that Christmas to me means you, that you 
are a part of the spirit of these times in my life. 

I want to tell you that the thought of you is 
sunshine to me. When memory brings back our 
days and words together, I am glad. 

If I were Fate I should make you very happy. 
I should write success upon your hands and brain 
every day, and bring restful sleep to you every 
night. Each impulse from my heart goes out to 
you in well-wishing. 

I like you. And I am angry with the space 
that separates us and the circumstances that ren- 
der our meetings few. You are "my kind of 
folks," and I have a constant desire to be near 
you. 

150 



I do not believe any of us realize how much 
friends mean to us, how their spirits subtly touch 
and stimulate ours when we are far apart, and 
what a glorious companionship they make for us 
when their faces gather around us in fancy in 
our moments of loneliness. Your face, my friend, 
is often with me, and I wish you could know what 
cheer it always brings. 

So here's to you ! I raise the glass of memory 
brimful of happy recollections and drink to you. 

All my good wishes fly to you as doves. I ap- 
preciate what you have meant to me. I value 
your personality, just as It is. I clasp your hand 
through the intervening distance. From the bot- 
tom of my heart I say "God bless you!" 

I think of you when I recall these words of 
Goethe : 

"This world is so waste and empty, when we 
figure but towns and hills and rivers in It; but to 
know that some one Is living on with us, even In 
silence, this makes our earthly ball a peopled gar- 
den." 



151 



WHAT IS A WOMAN TO DO? 

An anonymous letter has come to my desk. As 
a rule such missives slide right over into the waste- 
basket. But this one is different. It is not a 
cowardly effort to stab, nor malicious, nor in any 
wise the ordinary anonymous nuisance. It is so 
human, so real, and so gives expression to a very 
vital and common problem that I will make some 
quotation from it. 

After a few observations upon my writings 
which modesty prevents me from here setting 
forth, the writer says: 

"Briefly, my problem is a very old one, merely 
that of a woman who has long suffered from in- 
tense loneliness and heart-hunger. My greatest 
need seems to be the love and companionship of 
a congenial man. 

"I am well born, coming from an old family 
of refinement, culture, and one-time wealth. I 
am also well educated, a graduate of one of our 
foremost women's colleges. I am no longer 
young, neither am I old; my friends flatter me 
by saying that I look ten years younger than I am. 
Always have I had the reputation of unusual 
charm, that of personality, perhaps, rather than 
of beauty. 



"How, please, Is a woman alone, without fam- 
ily — for all have died — and with no social back- 
ground to meet desirable men, in a great city? 
Such a one would like to make friends and com- 
rades from among whom she could find a suitable 
mate. With every possible advantage of educa- 
tion and culture, living in a delightfully artistic 
home, adapted in every way to offer hospitality to 
friends, I perforce live practically the life of a 
hermit. 

"Is it any wonder that we restless, unsatisfied 
women, whom nature has intended for wives and 
mothers, should seek some avenue for expression, 
some absorbing interest which will enable us to 
stifle our longings? 

"Politics, or any sort of a career of publicity, 
does not appeal to me. I want a home and chil- 
dren. 

"Is it that there are no men of my kind in the 
city? And if there aie such, why is it so impos- 
sible to meet them ? 

"A well-known physician recently observed that 
'city men are not marrying men.' It is a great 
pity. 

"Boy and man friends I have had all my life, 
but never has the right one come. Perhaps, as 
has been said of me, I am too exclusive, too much 
inclined to seek the ideal. Certainly the tricks of 
such as 'Annie' in Shaw's 'Man and Superman' 
I have never felt I could stoop to. 

"What can a refined woman do, who believes 

153 



in marriage and the family, and who has scorned 
the occupation of husband-hunting? It seems to 
be too often the other type of woman who wins 
the man. 

"Pardon me if I do not sign my name. How 
can I to such a letter as this?" 

I cannot answer this appeal, for the simple 
reason that I do not know the answer. I give 
the letter to you, gentle reader, that you may 
realize, as this epistle so strongly impressed it 
upon me, that there are situations in life which 
our present civilization, morals, and conventions 
do not touch. Monogamy, religion, society's cus- 
toms are good enough and suit the many, but they 
are far from covering all of the deep needs and 
peculiar Issues of the human heart. 

And how pitiful our little smug philosophy be- 
fore this primeval cry of human instinct! 

Lady Unknown, I can only, through the dark- 
ness, send you a sincere thought, a handclasp of 
sympathy, and offer up a prayer to the kindly 
fates that they may send you, some adventurous 
day, your Prince and Knight, who shall know 
and value your woman's worth. I will not be like 
the father in Tennyson, 

"With a little hoard of maxims 
Preaching down a daughter's heart." 



154 



SHOULD GIRLS PAY? 

Speaking of the emancipation of woman and 
all that, there is one little item that seems to be 
overlooked. In order to get upon the same foot- 
ting as man, the woman demands the vote, the 
right to be a police officer, and to sit on a jury, 
the privilege of being a lawyer, physician, 
preacher, and merchant, commercial traveller, 
author, and clerk, and the eligibility to carry the 
latch-key. 

One thing is passed by In the strife of tongues. 
It is the right of the woman to pay. 

Reference is here had more particularly to 
young women In re food and drink, taxicabs, car- 
fare, ice cream sodas, dances, and theatres. 

Think, sisters! So long as custom demands 
that you allow the male to settle the bill at the 
restaurant when you have consumed ten dollars' 
worth of birds and vintage, while he has had milk 
toast, on the plea of indigestion, but for the real 
reason of Impecunloslty, will you not always be 
upon the level of an inferior, a child, a slave? 

Can a girl retain her self-esteem when she per- 
mits her masculine escort to count out the ten 
cents for her chocolate sundae at the drug store, 

^5S 



as if forsooth she were some sort of canary — 
let us not say poodle — to be fed with dainties, 
that her master may see her eat? 

And would not a young lady feel far more in- 
dependent, and hold up her head with a far 
prouder mien, if, when she goes to a theatre, she 
pay her half of the cab fare, of the dinner, of the 
tickets, and of the supper? Why should she be 
a pensioner for her amusements upon mere man? 

And why should he pay out eleven dollars for 
a bunch of long-stemmed roses, or a clump of 
violets with a yard of purple ribbon, and send 
said floral offering around to her house? Who is 
she that she should be tricked out in bouquets like 
a prize horse? Would it not be more in keeping 
with woman's new-found live-your-own-lifeness if 
he were to send to her a flower catalogue, indi- 
cate with a blue pencil the kind that he would 
admire to see her have, and let her pay for her 
posies herself? 

Money is the real badge of servitude. It is 
economic dependence, they tell us, that is throt- 
tling femininity. 

Budding suffragettes, therefore, might do well 
to reflect that if they wish Simon-pure individu- 
ality they should insist upon Dutch treat. Then, 
instead of being "his girl," some one to be shel- 
tered and fought for and paid for by him, she 
would be a comrade, an equal, and, possibly, a 
superior. 

If you are going to strike at the very core and 

156 



gist of the whole matter of feminine subserviency, 
girls, you must pay your own way. 

Otherwise you may be some day nothing but a 
wife. 



157 



OVER AND OVER FOREVER 

The other day I had a conversation with a 
genuine old troglodyte. He lived in an old town, 
in a large house surrounded by a cast-iron fence. 
There were a stone dog and a fountain in the 
yard. 

He belonged to one of the first families. One 
of his ancestors had heaped up a lot of money 
by making patent medicine, investing in real es- 
tate and never letting go of a nickel without a 
cry of pain. Subsequent generations had man- 
aged to sit on the money, so that the present 
scions of the house are the real thing. The fe- 
males start playing bridge in the morning, and 
the males buy polo ponies and are deeply inter- 
ested in club matters. 

The gentleman I talked with has nice side whis- 
kers, is head trustee of the church and the denom- 
inational college, is past grand high hewgag in 
the lodge, and has a large library of books bound 
in morocco with his "crest" stamped thereon. 

He spoke to me in this wise: "This talk of 
equality is all bosh. Why, children in the same 
family have different ability. If you would dis- 
tribute the entire wealth of the country, giving 

158 



each inhabitant an equal portion, within a week 
some would have plenty and many would have 
nothing. Some men are born with genius, brains, 
and leadership, and some are born helpless and 
without initiative." And so on to infinity, and 
nausea. 

Isn't that funny? For a hundred years or so 
it has been reiterated that all the equality any- 
body is clamoring for is equality of opportunity, 
equality before the law, the absence of unearned 
privilege, and has no reference whatever to nat- 
ural capacity. Never in the history of language 
did the equality of democracy refer to personal 
worth or force. 

Still, I suppose, a hundred years from now old 
gentlemen will be sitting on front porches and 
pooh-poohing the idea of all men being equal. 

The beauty of social and intellectual life is Its 
inequalities. It is because some people are better, 
wiser, and shrewder than others that life is so 
Interesting. The garden of human souls contains 
more different species than can be found amongst 
the flora of the earth. 

And It is precisely to preserve and emphasize 
these natural Irregularities that we want justice 
and a square deal. 

It is the Inherited irregularities of money and 
birth that produce intellectual and spiritual dead 
levels. 

When all babies "start at the scratch," all have 
an equal opportunity to make the most of their 

159 



natural abilities, we will see human diversity in 
its full charm. 

It is not aristocracy, but artificial aristocracy; 
not nobility, but humbug nobility; not the real 
superior class, but the non-superior, privilege- 
maintained class, that democracy threatens. 



1 60 



A SUCCESSFUL WOMAN 

There is a woman of my acquaintance who is 
a success. She is not rich, not gifted in the usual 
arts that gain notoriety, not young and peachy, 
not celebrated. 

She is in quite moderate circumstances, and 
lives with her husband in a flat in a neighborhood 
that is not "select." She has no children. 

She is past fifty, and glad of it. 

.Why is she successful? 

Because she is cheerful, and because she cheers 
everybody around her. 

And she is cheerful because she is the one 
woman out of, say, fifty I know who has suc- 
ceeded in perfectly Adjusting herself to her sur- 
roundings. 

The secret of the art of life is Adjustment, 
and whoever can accomplish that is entitled to 
be called successful. And to this title no other 
person has a right. 

No human being is able to secure an entirely 
ideal environment. No woman ever lived who 
had a perfect husband, perfect children, a perfect 
home, perfect clothes, a perfect income, and per- 
fect friends. Those who complain because they 

i6i 



lack in any one of these respects are foolish, and 
know nothing of how to take hold of life. 

This woman is content with the husband she 
has, she loves him for precisely what he is, and 
does not want to make him over. To have tink- 
ered him and changed him to suit her fancy of 
what a husband ought to be was, of course, im- 
possible, though many a silly woman wrecks her 
happiness at that task. She has done the better 
thing: She has Adjusted herself to the man as 
he is. 

Homekeeping is her lot. So she has Ad- 
justed herself to it. She has learned to love it. 
Her home is beautiful within, restful, tasteful, al- 
together delightful. 

Her income is at a certain figure. To that 
figure she has Adjusted all her desires. She 
lives just as contentedly as if the figure were ten 
times as great. 

She said to me the other day: "I wish you 
would write something to persuade women to 
love the common things, the everyday things. 
You ask me why I am so contented. It is because 
I love everything I see constantly about me. I 
love that chair, that table, that desk, those pic- 
tures, curtains, and rugs. They are all friends 
of mine. 

"Every piece of glass or china on my table 
means something to me. There is not an article 
in this apartment that does not please me when 
I look at it. 

162 



"I love my friends. I love my day's duties. I 
love the way we live. 

"When any thought of unlove presents itself 
to me, I put it away, just as if it were unclean. 
I will not give room to dislikes." 

This woman Is a point of sunshine in a cloudy 
world. If the Lord were angry with the city, as 
He was wroth against Sodom, and should look 
about to see if there were at least three souls 
worth while, for whose sake He might spare the 
town from His consuming fire, this woman would 
be one of the saving sort. For she is a radiating 
centre of helpfulness. She boosts all spirits. 

Any woman can be successful, as this woman is, 
if she will learn the art of Adjustment. For 
better than a billion dollars it is to be adjusted. 
Better than having everything just as you'd like 
it, is to like things just as they come to you. 



163. 



FRIED CHICKEN 

What are we coming to? Whither are we 
drifting? And oh, times and oh, manners! 

The chief high worshipful of the United States 
Food Research Department, Mary E. Penning- 
ton, now takes the stand and deposes that Fried 
Chicken Is bad for us. That Is to say, fried 
chicken that is fresh killed. 

She withdraws her objection provided that the 
fowl "after being killed be kept in dry, cold air 
for twenty-four hours while the flesh loses its 
heat. Then it should be ripened from three to 
ten days In a temperature of 32 degrees. Then," 
she says, "your chicken will be fit for cooking 
and eating." 

This, of course, Is prohibitive. Few farms and 
families have cold-storage houses. The plan In 
operation since the days of Adam Is to send one 
of the boys out into the yard to chase the de- 
voted pullet seven times around the barn, finally 
to sit on It, and then wring its neck. Shortly after 
this the hired girl dresses it, and ere the sun sets 
It is on the table bringing joy and gladness to the 
Inwards of the family. 

I cannot get over the conviction that these sci- 
164 



entific people are set upon robbing us of our most 
delectable things to eat. Naturally we would not 
strike a woman, but why does the Pennington 
lady attack us at the very core and citadel of our 
national gustatory treasure? 

For, I put it to the reader as man to man, was 
any dish ever so downright, plum Good as fried 
chicken ? 

All other forms of preparing the fowl fade into 
drabness beside this. Roast chicken, baked 
chicken, smothered chicken, fricasseed chicken, 
stewed chicken, pressed chicken, and devilled 
chicken — I take my stand with regulation south- 
ern fried chicken against them, one and all. 

Not jointed with the meataxe, after the man- 
ner of restaurants, but with all the joints sepa- 
rated carefully where the Creator made them, 
then rolled in flour and put into a skillet of lard 
and turned faithfully until a golden brown. Then 
pile the pieces high on the platter before dad, and 
have all the Browns and Robinsons to dinner, and 
plenty of real gravy and mashed potatoes, and 
I, for one, don't care what becomes of me. 

I have eaten the vaunted delicacies of the Old 
World and of the New; I have eaten bouillabaisse 
at Marseilles, goulash at Vienna, paprika schnit- 
zel at Munich, goose liver pie at Strasburg, sole 
at Marguery's in Paris, whitebait at Greenwich, 
beans in Boston, and oysters at Baltimore; but 
above them all Fried Chicken, when turned out 
by the deft hands of a real Negro mammy, has, 

165 



in the language of an ex-president, got them all 
beat to a frazzle. 

All Americans should rally to repel this inva- 
sion of our most sacred institution. Alas! the 
Philistines are upon us. In what hotel or res- 
taurant can you get old-fashioned fried chicken 
and gravy? Where in Europe can you find it? 
They know it not. Ask for it and the waiter 
looks at you as if he thought you were toying 
with him. 

Hence to arms ! If we must lose all our palla- 
diums and historic institutions let us go down 
like heroes, with the banner of "Fried Chicken" 
nailed to the mast. 



i66 



LEARN THANKSGIVING FROM THE 
HAVE-NOTS 

The President has proclaimed the annual day 
of Thanksgiving. Possibly that comes to you as 
a joke. What have I to be thankful for? you ask, 
and then begin to run over the list of your griev- 
ances. 

But go and see the have-nots, and maybe you 
will learn something, if you are not a hopeless 
whiner. 

Visit the have-not nations. Live a while in 
Russia or Mexico, have your opinions suppressed, 
your property confiscated, your life threatened, 
all without justice; perhaps then you may get a 
few thrills when you look at the American flag. 

Return, in your mind, to former ages ; feel how 
it seems to have the nobility despise, curse, and 
rob you, and treat you as a dog; to have a state 
church clap you in prison or roast you in the public 
square for daring to think; to have solemn mag- 
istrates condemn your mother to be hanged as a 
witch; to have your daughters outraged by the 
lord of the manor and your sons killed fighting 
his battles. 

If your skin is black, go back sixty years and 
167 



live among the have-nots of Liberty, and be sold 
in the market place as a chattel. 

If you are well, turn to the have-nots of health, 
to the hospitals, where the crowded prisoners of 
pain would give the world to walk and eat and 
work as you now do. Go to the dim chamber of 
the invalid, listen to the consumptive's cough, the 
dyspeptic's groan, the raving of the fevered and 
moan of the suffering and smitten. Then, if you 
are anything of a man, come out and hire some 
one to kick you for complaining ever. 

The have-nots of sound; observe the deaf and 
dumb, not to gloat over your advantages, but to 
realize what music and the voices of people and 
the gift of speech mean to you. 

Watch the pathetic faces of the have-nots of 
light; and, seeing the blind, learn to be humbly 
grateful toward that fate that grants to you the 
light of heaven. 

Do you know the have-nots of love? Consider 
them, and if one heart ever so simple loves you, 
be thankful. Mark the deserted wife, her dream 
shattered, her heart broken, her children father- 
less, and the burden of care upon her shoulders; 
and, if you have a husband that's half decent, be 
thankful. 

Go to the wronged, betrayed husband; look 
upon him; and if you have a faithful wife who 
believes in you and is glad because of you, be 
thankful. 

Little girl, little boy, have you a mother that 
i68 



hugs you up, and a daddy that's proud of you? 
Think of the have-nots, the boys and girls whose 
mother is still and gone or whose father is no 
more, and be as thankful as you can. 

Have you children? Call to mind the have- 
nots, the mother whose loneliness is that most 
bitter of all, the loneliness of the empty arms, of 
a breast where once cuddled a curly head. 

Then think of the worried, wretched, remorse- 
ful, perverted, of all those whose conscience stings 
them, and, if you have the comfortable self-re- 
spect of decency, be thankful. 

Visit, in your mind, the wide realm of the 
dead and half-dead. You have the unspeakable 
gift of Life. You can walk in the sun, and 
breathe the sweet air, and get the message of 
trees, mountains, and ocean; for you the flowers 
blow, and the snow falls, and the hearth-fire 
burns, and children's voices sound, and the light 
of love kindles in some one's eyes. 

Be thankful for life. 

Think of the have-nots, and reflect. Who am 
I that I should not also be among them ? 



169 



GEORGE WASHINGTON, GENTLEMAN 

The most significant thing about George 
Washington, it seems to me, that fact about him 
which our young folks would best note and imi- 
tate in him, is that he was a Gentleman. 

After all, the finest compliment we can pay any 
man is to say he is a gentleman. Not that he is 
a spurious gentleman, an idler, a spendthrift, and 
a dandy, but that he is a real man, and gentle. 

One of the best descriptions of a gentleman Is 
to be found in the words of St. Paul. Let me 
paraphrase them: 

"A gentleman suffereth long, and is kind; en- 
vieth not; vaunteth not himself and is not puffed 
up; doth not behave himself unseemly; seeketh 
not his own; is not easily provoked; and think- 
eth no evil." 

If you will analyze this list (found in I. Cor. 
xiii, 4, 5) you will find these eight marks of a 
gentleman, to wit: Patience, Humaneness, Ab- 
sence of Envy, Humility, Courtesy, Unselfishness, 
Self-Control, and High-Mindedness. In propor- 
tion as a man has these elements, whether he be 
a section hand on a railway or a millionaire's son, 
he is a gentleman. 

170 



And whoever has the opposite traits is no gen- 
tleman, even if he wear a dress suit and have a 
college education, to wit: Impatience, Cruelty, 
Envy, Pride, Discourtesy, Selfishness, Petulance, 
and Suspicion. 

By these tests George Washington was the 
Foremost Gentleman of America, and indeed far 
outclassed any prominent person of his time in 
the world. 

His patience was amazing. What hero in his- 
tory bore greater burdens, and with such unswerv- 
ing fortitude? In the turmoil of his day all men 
turned to him as the one strong, rock-like figure, 
the embodiment of the highest quality of man- 
hood in the New World. 

He was Humane. Under his dignity was a 
warm heart. Not a vicious, cruel, or resentful act 
is in his record. 

He had no Envy, which perhaps is the very 
meanest feeling common among mortals. An- 
other's success pleased him. The cynic remark of 
La Rochefoucauld was untrue at least in him: 
"In the adversity of our best friends we often 
find something that is not exactly displeasing." 

He had Humility, perhaps the greatest of vir- 
tues, as Pride is the sure sign of a petty nature. 
He never coveted prominence. He never strug- 
gled for office. He ruled only because it was the 
best way he could serve. He refused a crown, 
and retired gladly from the presidency. 

He was Courteous. This is an acid test of 
171 



greatness. The small man's first impulse, when 
clothed with a "little brief authority," is to dom- 
ineer. How many a false great man betrays his 
vulgar soul by rudeness and disregard of others' 
feelings ! 

He was Unselfish. He "sought not his own." 
A coarse nature is sensitive about his "rights." 
He is alert to his advantage. He wants all that 
is coming to him. But when you meet a great 
soul you find no trace of the pig in it. His noble 
disinterestedness rises upon you like the sun. 

He was Self-Controlled. You find in him none 
of that petulance and irritation, of those storms 
of alternate self-pity and self-conceit you see in 
Napoleon. Napoleon had great talents; Wash- 
ington was a great man. 

He was High-Minded. He "bore all things, 
believed all things, hoped all things, endured all 
things." He trusted men. He was slow to listen 
to slander. He clung stubbornly to his ideals 
concerning his country. 

He was not perhaps what the world would call 
a saint. He had his imperfections, his limitations. 
He was not a superman. 

But he was a Gentleman. 

And thus he bore without abuse 
The grand old name of gentleman, 
Defamed by every charlatan, 

And soiled with all ignoble use! 

He was a Gentleman; and you cannot go 
172 



amiss, young man, if you love that fine old face 
that looks down upon you from its frame on the 
wall, where your grandfather hung it, and if you 
strive to mould your life after the example of 
George Washington. 



173 



FREEDOM AND KNOWLEDGE FOR 

WOMEN 

Freedom without knowledge Is a curse. 

To leave a child of six without guardianship 
would be criminal, because he has not knowledge 
enough to keep out of danger. 

A lot of ignorant savages in a state of entire 
freedom would proceed to butcher one another. 

Hence a thorough system of education is rec- 
ognized as essential among people who wish to 
live in a democracy. 

American girls are the freest in the world. 

Europe is amazed at them. 

Here girls come and go as they please, and 
have the independence of men. In Europe they 
are carefully guarded at home, educated in con- 
vents or in rigidly sequestered schools, their court- 
ing days are strictly chaperoned, and their mar- 
riage is managed for them. 

There are not a few who decry our custom, 
holding that woman's liberty is too dangerous a 
thing, and that parents should maintain closer 
surveillance. 

But the real trouble is not that girls have too 
much freedom, but that they do not have enough 
knowledge. 

174 



A system that keeps girls In ignorance of the 
most vital facts and laws of life, that makes total 
lack of information about their bodies and the 
functions thereof to be a sort of religious and 
moral excellence, and then turns them loose upon 
their own responsibility to mingle freely withj 
men, is absurd. 

The first right of a woman is not to be pro- 
tected; it is to know, so that she can protect her- 
self. 

The movement for "the emancipation of 
woman" is good. They have as much claim to 
liberty as men. But it is cruel and illogical to en- 
large their freedom to equal man's without at the 
same time doing something to equip them with 
that knowledge the lack of which makes freedom 
a road to ruin. 

We cannot return to the old way of chaperon- 
age and put high walls around women to save 
them. That is not in line with progress. It 
would be to turn again to orientalism, or medie- 
valism. What we can and must do is to make vir- 
tue the twin sister of intelligence and not of ig- 
norance. 

The second wife of Napoleon was brought up 
as a child with particular seclusion; she was not 
allowed to see males even among the domestic 
animals. She was fond of frogs, but even the 
male frogs were exterminated. That is the sort 
of thing the old regime called "purity." In the 

175 



minds of a great many worthy people Innocence 
means still utter lack of knowledge. 

But our mothers are as chaste as our daugh- 
ters. The hospital nurse may be as chaste-minded 
as the young miss in an exclusive "finishing 
school." And the soul of a happily married man 
is much more likely to be "pure" than that of a 
celibate. 

By all means loose the bonds of women and set 
them free; but do not imagine you can do this 
without peril unless at the same time you get rid 
of your ideas of feminine ignorance being neces- 
sary to virtue. 



176 



THE WRITTEN EXAMINATION 

Not long ago a little girl of thirteen, in one 
of our public schools, tried to take poison because 
she dreaded the examination set for the next day. 
She was rescued by her companions. 

Also a student in the University of Pennsyl- 
vania committed suicide because, as was discov- 
ered by inquiring among his fellow students, "he 
was of an extremely nervous temperament and 
was repeating his second year's work as a result 
of having failed to pass his examinations." 

The name of the system-worshipping and mar- 
ble-hearted teacher who invented examinations is 
happily buried in obscurity. His soul probably 
haunts all dark schoolhouses and frightens all 
little boys and girls who sit up late cramming into 
their noggins historical dates and geometric crazy- 
quilt patterns. 

Written examinations are a relic of barbarism. 
They rank along with racks and thumbscrews, 
birch rods and leather straps as a method of 
"cruel and unusual punishment." Only these are 
not unusual, more's the pity! 

A teacher who associates a month or so with 
a pupil, and at the end of that time needs a writ- 

177 



ten examination to find out what the child knows, 
ought to resign and make place for a real teacher. 

The written examination is a test of but one 
thing, the learner's skill in writing. 

Writing is an art; it is a trick, you might say, 
that one has by gift of God or by practice. Be- 
cause I can tell about a matter is no sign that I 
know much about it. 

I can probably write a better essay on horse- 
shoeing than any blacksmith in town, because 
composing sentences is my trade, but if I went to 
shoe a horse I should very likely be kicked to 
death. 

By going to the public library and consulting 
books I might prepare a paper on engineering, 
building bridges, or constructing office buildings 
that would be much more readable and interest- 
ing than any practical expert could furnish; yet 
who would think of hiring me to build even a hen- 
house? 

The gift of gab and the gift of doing have 
nothing to do with each other. 

A child might be taken by an intelligent instruc- 
tor into the fields and woods daily, and learn to 
know intimately plant life, the habits, laws of 
growth, and relationship of all the flora of his 
neighborhood ; but another child, bookish and im- 
practical, could confine himself to his textbook in 
botany and give you a written examination that 
would rank lOO per cent., while the first child's 
paper would be full of baitings and confusion. 

178 



As an Exercise, as a means of practice to cul- 
tivate clearness of thought, the written exami- 
nation has its place. But as a Test it is a hum- 
bug. 

It is usually conducted under circumstances pe- 
culiarly trying to nervous pupils, and there are 
many perfectly competent minds that refuse to 
operate under pressure. 

In boy or man let the day's work count, and let 
it be judged with sympathy, fairness, and appre- 
ciation. 



179 



THERE ARE OTHERS 

A GOOD part of all you do Is done by others. 

To all your righteousness, and all your weak- 
ness and wickedness, others contribute a large 
share. 

The criminal has some truth when he lays the 
blame on others. The banker might as justly 
place the credit for his prosperity to others. 

There is a deal of humbug in individuality. 
Each of us is a part of our parents, neighbor- 
hood, times, of the prevalent public opinion, of 
soul-drifts hither and yonder. We progress or 
recede, we suppose; but it Is like one walking in 
a coach while the train is going its own course 
with us and all our fellow-passengers. 

In Bernard Shaw's "Philanderer" Is a line: 
"If you take people seriously off the stage, why 
don't you take them seriously on It, where they 
are under some sort of decent restraint?" 

Mary Lawton, an actress playing In the above- 
mentioned comedy, expressed an opinion, in a re- 
cent newspaper interview, that there Is a deal of 
irony in that line which only actor people can ap- 
preciate. 

"Is there any place in the world," she asks, 
i8o 



"where a human being Is more restrained than 
on the stage? Any place where every result de- 
pends not only on yourself and your power, but 
on everything and everybody else? Is there any 
other profession where the crucial moment may 
be spoiled by a giggling schoolgirl or by a tack on 
the carpet? Where your entire effect is wasted 
if you are not given the right cue ? Where your 
big scene may be entirely lost by a chair put in 
the wrong place?" 

If this be the case upon the stage, then "all the 
world's a stage," for the like holds true every- 
where. 

The orator's triumph is a nicely balanced af- 
fair, of himself, his genius, and his effort on the 
one hand, and the time, the place, and the audi- 
ence on the other. Beecher's speech in England, 
where he subdued the mob and won undying 
fame; Webster's reply to Hayne, and the ad- 
dresses of Burke and John Bright make poor 
reading now, at least compared with their tremen- 
dous power when uttered, for the others are no 
longer here. 

The rule holds in the smaller matters of life. 
Every swain knows how the success of his avowal 
depends fearfully upon seizing precisely the psy- 
chological moment. 

There are things you can say to your wife un- 
der certain circumstances and all will be well, 
while if you are stupid in your choice of time 
and place woe be unto you ! 

i8i 



The net effect of anything you say, for that 
matter, to anybody anywhere is more than half 
determined by the "stage setting." 

The fact is, life is team play. 

Most of the failures have imagined that they 
were the only persons on the boards. 

Most of the sensitive, pouting, and soured sim- 
ply missed their cue. 

The best conversationalist is not the one who 
says the cleverest things, but the one who waits, 
judges, and times his remark perfectly. 

Whoever will "make a hit" in this life must 
watch his neighbor as himself. 

Much of the prominence of the prominent is 
due to their ability to keep off the stage while it 
is the turn of some one else. 

It was not a bad idea of Mr. Roosevelt to 
visit Africa and South America. 

And to all those who suffer the pangs of a 
neglected ego, and who for one reason or an- 
other feel that they have hardly won the applause 
in Hfe they deserved, it may be well to hand the 
homely observation: 

"There are others!" 



182 



REAL GREATNESS 

Jacob H. Schiff, at the annual meeting of the 
Hebrew Free Loan Society of New York, said 
the other day, when he was introduced as a "great 
man": 

"Greatness often comes from accident or fa- 
vor, and if this lifts us above the multitude it 
should carry with it the realization of greater re- 
sponsibilities on our part toward others." 

And herein Mr. Schiff showed one trait at least 
of a great man, and said a great thing. 

For you can distinguish a great from a small 
man in this, that when riches, or honors, or prom- 
inence come to him the great man is humbled 
and sobered by his sense of duty, and by his con- 
sciousness of how little after all he had to do with 
it. 

No sincere soul really thinks he is superior. 
Success "comes" to us. No man earns it; or, 
rather, the one who earns it is denied it as often 
as not. 

Oliver Wendell Holmes described how an idea 
"came" to him, striking him like a bullet, as he 
expressed it. 

JEvery creative mind has felt this, how things 

J83 



"just come." The composer of music, the 
painter, the sculptor, the novelist, dramatist and 
orator, the inventor, all have that sense of recipi- 
ency. Only the egotistic fool thinks he is the 
author of his own conceptions. 

Socrates had his "daimon" that whispered to 
him suggestions. And every other great construc- 
tive soul has had that peculiar feeling of being 
played upon by some force or spirit not of him- 
self. 

Only little souls are cocky and chesty and 
greedy for praise, whether they deserve it or not. 
These are the plagiarists, copiers, and second- 
raters of the world. 

The same is true of the greatly rich. For there 
are contemptible rich and noble rich. 

Under existing economic conditions a man may 
inherit a million dollars. In proportion as he re- 
gards it as "mine, to do with as I please," he is 
small. He probably will spend it in luxuries and 
amusements. He and his set are nuisances. Their 
very existence is immoral. 

But if he realizes that destiny, under its laws, 
has put this wealth upon him, for no merit of his 
own, and that the high and serious task of ad- 
ministering it for the welfare of mankind is laid 
on his shoulders, then he becomes great. 

So also if a man makes his own fortune. He 
still perceives, if he be great, that "accident or 
favor" has played into his hands, and he can have 
no peace nor self-respect unless he gives himself 

184 



over to doing what he can to help those less for- 
tunate. 

This is the modern conscience, which is better 
and sounder than the conscience of any other age. 

More and more the magnificent ones of earth 
are hearing the dim vo'ce of that something or 
somebody, call it God, call it humanity, saying to 
them: 

"What hast thou done with the talent Lent 
thee?" 



185 



HAPPY DRUGS 

Let us suppose there is a Devil. 

I do not say there is ; but suppose there is, some 
being, a sort of vicious god, who has a grudge 
against the human race, who is thoroughly mali- 
cious, and takes delight in ruining men and women, 
and gloats over their physical agonies, mental tor- 
ments, and spiritual heart-breaks. 

If there be such an Evil Spirit, he no doubt 
considers the Habit-Forming Drug his bright 
particular masterpiece. For such drugs have pro- 
duced more misery to the square inch in humanity 
than any other agency. 

In every human being there is implanted the 
desire for happiness. We all want to "feel 
good." The normal means for producing the sen- 
sation of contentment consists in obeying the laws 
of hygiene and of morals. 

Whoever conforms to the rule of nature as to 
his body, and of God as to his mind, has inward 
success ; that is, he is cheerful, sound, and strong. 

And now comes the Devil and says: 

"You want to feel good? Why follow the 
poky road to health? That takes self-control and 
will-power. It is hard. I will show you the eas]'- 
est way. Just swallow this Happy Drijg/' 

J 86 



The Happy Drugs have been known from time 
immemorial. The oldest is Alcohol. It has got 
itself woven into the customs and the imagina- 
tion of the people until many cannot conceive of 
having a good time without it. It is the expected 
thing at weddings, wakes, and all manner of cele- 
brations. In vain Intelligence has shown that it 
is a poison, habit-forming, weakens the heart and 
hardens the arteries. "What the hell do we 
care?" 

A. man requested permission the other day to 
visit the Tombs prison in New York. Upon 
searching him the officer found some envelopes 
containing the drug heroin. In these envelopes 
were notes addressed to various inmates. One 
of them read: 

"Dear Mac — A little Happy Dust. Regards 
to Jim and all the boys." 

Heroin, a drug allied to morphine, but deadlier 
and cheaper than either that or cocaine, is the 
latest dope of the slums, the latest invention of the 
able and efficient Mr. Devil. 

Dr. Jackson R. Campbell, who has been prison 
physician for some years, says: "Heroin is one 
of the most desperate dangers that confront our 
race. The stuff is so cheap — lo cents' worth of 
it is enough to produce the 'sensation' for two or 
three hours — that any boy or girl can afford 
to buy it. But, once accustomed to it, the user 
needs more and more, and will commit any crime 
to get it. 

187 



"Within a mile's radius of 149th street and 
Third avenue, the Bronx," the doctor declared, 
"there are at least a thousand victims of the 
heroin habit, including many boys and girls. Po- 
lice records show many arrests of children for 
having the stuff." 

There may be people who do not believe in 
Hell, but they are not found among the Happy 
Drug users. They Know There Is a Hell. 
They Live in It. 

Let any boy or girl — or grown person, for that 
matter — who reads this Think a minute! The 
Drug That Makes You Happy Is the Most 
Lying, Cheating, Cruel, and Terrible 
Enemy You Have in the World. Don't 
Take It! 



188 



THE UNFROCKED 

There was a curious banquet held at Paris not 
long ago. There met a hundred and fifty ex- 
priests and ex-preachers, who did not blush either 
for their past or for their present. 

To one class of men society seems peculiarly 
unjust — to the "unfrocked." The man who 
leaves the ministry, no matter how conscientious 
and sincere his motives, is always looked upon as- 
kance. We persist in regarding him as if he were 
tainted with the flavor of desertion and disloyalty. 

Why? Is it not more honorable to leave holy 
orders, when one no longer believes the articles 
of faith, or when one is convinced of the inutility 
of the institution, when the development of one's 
mind and heart has led him honestly to these con- 
victions, than to remain and be insincere? 

Does not the church itself believe that an hon- 
est layman, no matter what his views, is better 
than a dishonest clergyman? 

For all that, the rupture between the parson 
and his organization is always painful. Laymen 
hardly welcome him. By a strange illogicality we 
are usually cold to the men who enter our ranks 
for conscience' sake. We mistrust them; we put 
pressure upon them to conceal their past as some- 

189 



thing of which to be ashamed; as a rule, they have 
a hard time making a living. 

Among the ex-clergymen at the banquet men- 
tioned we may note three lawyers, two police mag- 
istrates, two farmers, a physician, two artists, two 
capitalists, one mayor, besides commercial travel- 
lers, university professors, accountants, and public 
school teachers. 

They have formed a union which proposes, ac- 
cording to its by-laws, never to proselyte or in 
any way attempt to induce men to leave the minis- 
try, but to extend a helping hand to those who, 
on their own initiative, have severed their eccle' 
siastical ties, and to help them in their endeavors 
to gain an honest livelihood. 

It will do no harm to the church — it can only do 
good — to make the way as easy as possible for 
those who have ceased to be in harmony with 
its faith or its methods to get out. 

In most instances men enter the ministry when 
young. When they arrive at maturity their con- 
victions may in all honor have undergone a 
change. It should not be taken as a matter of 
course that their reluctance to continue in the 
ministry means a loss of religion or of personal 
integrity. The minister may discover that, while 
his religious sentiment is as profound as ever, he 
is not adapted by nature or gifts to be a clergy- 
man. 

His retirement from church office may be as he- 
roic and worthy of praise as his entrance into it. 

190 



MEANING OF THE WOMAN 
MOVEMENT 

Very few of those engaged in the movements 
of modern feminism, or of those opposed, realize 
the depth, the tidal resistlessness, the cosmic char- 
acter, of the force which is, now quietly and now 
with turbulence, bringing women into even higher 
prominence in our civilization. 

Most of the things advanced women are striv- 
ing for are straws, but they show the way the 
wind blows. Getting the vote, in itself, means lit- 
tle; so also mean little the wearing of trousers, 
the entrance into the professions or into business, 
or the capture of any of the superficial privileges 
traditionally enjoyed by men only. But as indi- 
cations of the gradual feminization of the race 
these things mean much. 

In a state of nature and of freedom, where so- 
ciety is not continually prevented from normal 
growth by wars and threatening wars, as has been 
the case up to this age and everywhere but in 
America, woman would be naturally the superior 
and dominant sex. 

Ruskin points out that Shakespeare, and Scott, 
and Dante, and all the greatest masters of litera- 
ture have not been mistaken in making the heroine 

191 



always the stronger spiritually. It is she who is* 
queen and disposer, it is for her the hero fights 
and labors, his reward and his incentive are in 
her keeping. 

Man is the weaker vessel. Only in imperfectly 
developed races is the strong man master. As 
culture and intellectual growth advance the reins 
of control pass into the woman's hands. 

Biologists are now intimating that it is prob- 
able that Eve was made first and that Adam Is the 
after product created to assist In the perpetuation 
of the race. 

That women now "look up" to men, and are 
usually clinging vines and leaning, dependent crea- 
tures, idle dolls or indolent playthings, is simply 
due to the lingering influence of centuries of ar- 
tificial conditions caused by the universal presence 
of war. 

In time to come the woman and not the man 
will be the Head of the Family. Hers are the 
children more than his; she carries them while 
they are being formed; her body and soul Is 
poured into them. 

In marriage the man will take the woman's 
name. All that he achieves will be frankly rec- 
ognized as caused by her direction. Property 
rights will be vested in her, not in him. 

She it is that has the divine beauty of face and 
form, and when the struggle shall have been trans- 
ferred from fists and clubs to ideas and spirit po- 
tencies she will naturally assume leadership. 

192 



The farther we evolve from beasthood the 
nearer we approach to a woman-ruled world. 

In all the things that tend to the health and 
soundness of mankind, and hence to "the outpopu- 
lating power" of a nation, woman is superior. 
She has by nature the strength that lies in chas- 
tity, loyalty, and the appreciation of the higher 
spiritual quantities of reverence, self-control and 
idealism. Man is carnal, drunken, and earthy, 
only kept up to the mark by the enchantment 
woman casts upon him. 

The "mastery" of such men as Napoleon and 
Bismarck is crude, cheap stuff. The world to-day, 
and even more to-morrow, needs and will need 
another kind of mastery, not that of battle might, 
of Tammany power, of the brutal efficiency of 
enormous capital, but the mastery of conscience, 
of the sense of justice, and of the just estimate 
of human values. 

Here woman is supreme. Hail to her, queen 
of the coming race ! 

Even to-day a man does no work worth while 
except it be to lay it at the feet of the woman he 
serves. 



193 



THEORY AND PRACTICE IN 
BRINGING UP CHILDREN 

The trouble with most of the theories of child- 
training is that the child is supposed to be located 
in the middle of a forty acre lot, and to be at- 
tended by three all-wise angels, who work in shifts 
of eight hours each and who unerringly know al- 
ways just what is the matter and precisely what 
to do. 

If there is anything more impractical and more 
maddening to a poor mortal parent or teacher 
than a grand educational programme I do not 
know what it is. 

Several factors are invariably left out. In the 
first place, there are relatives. You may deter- 
mine to refrain from carrying, rocking, or jig- 
gling the baby, and to accustom him to lying in 
his crib without attention, but what are you go- 
ing to do when Aunt Jane, who has money, comes 
along and insists on picking him up and showing 
him the boofle flowers? 

You may endeavor to break him of crying and 
attempt to let him whine himself to sleep; but 
grandma has something to say about that. 

And what happens to the most rational systems 

194 



of child management when the mother has four 
little ones cooped up in a city flat, and must take 
care of them and keep them from poisoning or 
maiming themselves, and must do this in such in- 
tervals of time as she can snatch between wash- 
ing dishes, getting dinner, cleaning house, sew- 
ing, and mending? 

Besides, a perfectly good mother may not be 
physically strong. Four vigorous little personali- 
ties demanding instant care all day may reduce 
her to the borders of nervous prostration. And 
where are the grand laws of patience and preven- 
tion when your back hurts like the toothache and 
you are so tired you don't know your name? 

Also, a good mother may not be endowed with 
mental perspicacity and deep wisdom. A thou- 
sand times she does not know what to do. She 
may have real love and a high purpose, and do 
the wrong thing from sheer bewilderment or ig- 
norance. 

As for the schoolteacher, her ideal systems for 
developing the growing mind are usually crushed 
to death by numbers. Sixty children in a crowded 
room are too much for any human teacher. By 
and by she is forced to drop back into mere rou- 
tine because it is impossible to give each child due 
care and be alive at the end of the week. 

Yet, somehow, children do grow up and flour- 
ish. Weak and incompetent mothers bring up 
capable children, who love her and give her credit 
in maturer years for the best that is in them. Out 

I9A 



of the homes of the poor come great men and 
noble women. Out of the overcrowded school- 
room garden human plants rise strong and fruit- 
ful. 

It is because human nature is better than any 
scheme for bettering it; because honest love is 
better than shrewd handling; because motherhood 
is more efficacious in its instincts than any experts 
are in their pedagogy and psychology; and be- 
cause the child absorbs helpful forces from the 
atmosphere of a school that far outbalance the 
personal guidance he misses. 



196 



UNNOTED HEROISM 

The world is full of unnoted heroism. 

That is the best kind. Spectacular heroism is 
always a little tainted. 

The man who stops a runaway horse in the city 
street, or the man who dives and rescues a drown- 
ing woman, or the soldier who dashes forward 
in the face of death, does well; but there is a bet- 
ter type. 

Many can act nobly under the spur of sudden 
impulse and with an inspiring audience; but to 
live upon the high plane of self-sacrifice daily 
takes finer fibre. 

There is the workman who brings home his en- 
tire week's pay every Saturday night, that it may 
be used for the care of wife and children, and 
that the balance be put in the savings bank. Some 
look on him as tame and dull, a routiner with no 
spirit; but he would like to go to the ball game 
as well as any man, to take his beer in the saloon 
and crack jokes with the boys, and to buy for 
himself the expensive luxuries men enjoy. He 
daily subdues himself in little things; heroism 
with him is a rule and not an exception; it is of 
the kind the world passes by, often misjudges 
and despises. 

197 



And how many women, unknown and un- 
praised, are living days of constant devotion to 
high purpose! They are hidden in homes, they 
are persecuted by petty economies, they have given 
up tastes soul-deep and renounced ambitions dear 
as life, just to be faithful and loyal in the small 
corner where destiny has placed them. 

What a wonderful, divine thing is a human 
being! Capable of how serene heights of great- 
ness! 

Whoever would see this, however, must him- 
self be great, for to small souls all men are worms 
and spiders. 

And against what odds the common man main- 
tains his character! Sensational newspapers pour 
into his consciousness their daily gathering of per- 
version, violence, and greed; novels exploit their 
stories of the idle and privileged class, and the 
morbidities of passion; almost every cult and 
ism exclaims against the innate evil of men and 
women; yet he clings to his reverences, does his 
work and keeps clean. 

The most admirable nobility is that of the com- 
mon run of people. The mass of men is better 
than any class of men. 

You can bribe, debauch, and ruin this or that 
group; you cannot corrupt a whole people. 

It is mankind that is steadily, persistently good. 
It is humanity that rejects all poisons. It is the 
human race that best reflects the faces of the 
gods. 

198 



If any one would drink of the unfailing spring 
of optimism, feed on the treasures of hope, learn 
the secret of wholesome faith, and find that sweet, 
strong quality in spirit that corresponds to the 
sanity and peace found in nature, let him study 
to know and to love the common people, for theirs 
are the infinite resources, the rich supplies, of 
unnoted heroism. 



199 



HOUSEWORK 

There is no better business, no nobler nor 
more helpful to mankind, than housework. 

And it is one of the curious quirks of the 
times that while we rank "home" alongside of 
"heaven," call it the sacredest word in the lan- 
guage and all that, we set housework or home- 
keeping down as one of the least desirable of 
occupations. 

Nine girls out of ten would rather do anything 
than cook, make beds, and wash dishes. 

Country girls swarm to the cities, and city girls 
flock to offices, to type and keep books and mind 
cash; leaving only those who cannot do anything 
else to attend to homes. 

The servant girls are in the rearward of the 
march of labor. They have few or no organiza- 
tions, no standardized training, no social standing, 
no rights any one is bound to respect, and no in- 
dependent spirit to demand those rights. 

Things also are getting worse. The disgust- 
ing custom of tipping is on the increase, insulting 
to the worker and demoralizing to the giver. For 
the tip is never anything else than a cheap and 
nasty substitute for paying decent wages. 

200 



The housemaid is one of the few laborers who 
wear distinctive uniforms, emphasizing class dis- 
tinction. 

The home seems to be a little corner where 
the snows of aristocratic sentiment linger in the 
spring of democracy. "Housework," says Ida 
Tarbell, "is the only field of labor in which there 
seems to be a general tendency to abandon the 
democratic notion and return frankly to the aris- 
tocratic regime." 

And that is exactly what is the matter with 
domestic service. For wherever the vain, vulgar, 
hoity-toity idea prevails that one class of workers 
is inferior to another, wherever the segregative, 
exclusive feeling of artificial aristocracy is found, 
there is the soiling touch, the dirty fingers of in- 
justice, the poison of caste. 

What housework needs is the redeeming breath 
of democracy. There is no reason why making 
good biscuit and maintaining a home in order and 
beauty should not be as dignified a business as 
laying brick or attending to the plumbing. Why 
should not the kitchen girls have their union, 
their regular hours of service, and their well-de- 
fined rights, as well as the bricklayer and the 
plumber? 

There is no department of labor where brains 
are more needed than in housework. The intel- 
ligent, deft, and capable maid-of-all-work can 
produce quite as much human contentment, joy, 
and gladness as any of the world's workers. 

201 



Those women who burn with the desire to do 
something to emancipate their sex, to make 
woman's lot more tolerable and light, are invited 
to turn their attention to improving the condition 
of serving girls, who need far more sympathy 
and get far less than shop girls. 



202 



FEAR KILLS TALK 

The joy of talk Is to say what you please. 

Any restraint upon the free expression of what- 
ever pops into your mind kills conversation. 

Conversation becomes a bore when people are 
saying what they are supposed to say. Then it 
is no more the free mingling of souls, for each is 
posing. It is dress parade. 

I would rather hear a man swear than to be 
entertained by some one who is working at me 
from a sense of duty. 

When you have to be careful what you say, 
the only refuge is silence. 

Hence parsons, college presidents, and all those 
in high office, who are likely to be quoted, and 
whose chance words may upset that terrible crea- 
ture known as the "young person," must take one 
of two alternatives ; either they must speak rarely 
and be mindful to say nothing when they do speak, 
or they must practice the handling of bromidions 
and avoid saying anything that is fresh or has 
sharp corners. 

New-minted speech is only for the irresponsi- 
ble. Slang words especially, being the babes of 
language, such words as will not for years be per- 

203 



mitted to associate with their elders, are to be 
used by people of no standing. 

The conversation of children, when they are 
by themselves, or among such grown persons as 
put them under no bond of fear, is the most in- 
teresting of all talk. They say things that are 
immensely funny, that are stuffed with ingenuous 
feeling and piquant with rare philosophy; and for 
but one reason, that they do not care. 

It is fear that blights talk, as it nips in the bud 
all flowers of the soul. 

Let us stretch our legs under the table, and 
until long after midnight crack our jokes, tell our 
pet hates and loves, expose our doubts, air our 
heresies, give wing to our fancies, gossip freely 
of the neighbors, and preen our comfortable vani- 
ties, and so will our souls empty themselves and 
become clean vessels, holding over till to-morrow 
no stagnant opinions to breed spiritual malaria. 

I once peddled maps, when young, and learned 
a speech by rote, which I repeated to every vic- 
tim. By and by I came to loathe it. Also it be- 
came deliciously absurd. Which Is a reasonable 
contradiction. 

And I never go to a reception, or tea, or other 
regulated talkfest, and listen to the usualities ban- 
died back and forth with well-tempered laughter, 
but I think of that map-peddling rigmarole, and 
wonder why the whole company does not break 
out into Gargantuan laughter at itself. 

The better way for us would be to hold no 
204 



speech at all with them from whom we expect 
fear or favor, only make signs, and reserve our 
frank openings of heart for those whom we owe 
nothing, for those who take our chatter for amuse- 
ment only. 

For the rest, let us read books, or newspapers, 
or attend lectures. Why talk when we are afraid? 



205; 



LINCOLN, DEMOCRAT, 
SERVANT OF ALL 

It is rather unfortunate, in the interests of 
clear thinking, that the two leading political par- 
ties of the United States take the titles of Demo- 
crat and Republican. It makes it difficult to speak 
of democracy or republicanism without leading 
some of your auditors to fancy that you mean one 
of the two great job-hunting organizations. 

When I call Lincoln a democrat I have, of 
course, no intention of identifying him with any 
political faction, but refer to the fact that he 
believed in the rule of the people and not of the 
classes, which is the root-meaning of democracy. 

To me Lincoln was the greatest democrat that 
ever lived — that is, no one seems to have had 
such an utter confidence in the common people 
as he. 

In the first place, he knew the people. He did 
not come down from some higher social level to 
"do them good." He was not a missionary to 
the people. He was one of them. He was born 
right. His parents, relatives, and all the neigh- 
bors of his early life were "just folks." 

It was a free, wide country he lived in. Every- 
206 



body worked. There were no endowed loafers, 
no self-styled superior class. A man was a man 
for a' that in Sangamon County, Illinois, In the 
forties and fifties. The only way to know a peo- 
ple Is to be born of them and to have your youth 
soaked In their environment. 

And Lincoln "sensed" the people, knew what 
they wanted, loved, feared, and hoped better than 
any other man of his age, and, possibly, of any 
age. He was the people's nerve, part and par- 
cel of their body; he Felt them. 

Then he esteemed them. He thought the 
whole people had more sense than any leader 
or wise statesman. You are never a genuine dem- 
ocrat until you think that. He expressed It 
in his wondrous way when he said: "You can 
fool some of the people all the time, and all of 
the people some of the time, but you can't fool 
all of the people all the time." 

And the people, he believed, were not only 
wiser, but they were also honester, purer, holier, 
and more nearly right than any small number or 
specially trained or bred group. To him the will 
of that great people from whom he sprang was 
the will of God. Their grim purpose was the 
purpose of God. The majesty of their deep feel- 
ing he revered as If It were the majesty of God. 

There was none of the clap-trap and hypocrisy 
of the office seeker in his appreciation of the peo- 
ple. It was through and through his soul. 

He was not a ruler, as Julius Caesar. He was 
207 



not a leader, nor teacher, nor guide to the peo- 
ple, as other great men have been. He was one 
of the greatest Servants of the people that ever 
lived. 

He did not "want to help" them; he knew they 
could help themselves if they could find the right 
kind of servant, and that he strove to be. 

He knew the people did not need any king or 
general or statesman to instruct them what to do, 
nor any philanthropist nor billionaire to do things 
for them; all they wanted was to be given a 
chance to do things for themselves, to struggle 
out of their poverty by their own efforts, to rem- 
edy their own wrongs and to carry out their own 
reforms when they got ready. 

And what Lincoln stood for is the thing Amer- 
ica, and all the world, for that matter, needs to- 
day — to wit, that the people do not need so much 
new laws, new and fantastic schemes of govern- 
ment, new gospels, wise guides, benefactors, and 
helpers, but they simply need agents who will 
carry out their will; they need simple justice, a 
square deal, and a chance to paddle their own 
canoe. 

The world to-day needs the faithful servant, 
not the superior ruler. 

In Lincoln was fulfilled the words of One who 
also took upon Himself the form of a servant: 

"And whosoever will be great among you shall 
be the servant of all." 



208 



A $5,000 FLEA 

I SEE by the papers that Alfred Charles de 
Rothschild of London is said, on the authority 
of Edmond Perrier of the French Institute, to 
have paid $5,000 for a specimen of a rare va- 
riety of flea — one of the kind which is occasion- 
ally found in the skin of the sea otter. The flea 
is to be added to Mr. de Rothschild's entomologi- 
cal collection. 

The other day two postage stamps were sold 
in Paris for $1,000. They had been issued by 
some island country. Immediately afterward an 
earthquake swallowed up the place, and only 
these two of the whole issue of stamps happened 
to escape in the mail. 

Every once in a while we hear of a millionaire 
dropping off and leaving a large heap of junk. 
They shall all be eclipsed when I shy my hat into 
the ring. 

For when my ship comes in, or when my rich 
uncle (joke) passes and saddles forty million 
plunks upon me, I know what I will do. 

At present I am living quite comfortably, with 
one wife, plenty of bread and cheese, and with 
pie upon occasion; but that sort of thing will 
be all over. 

209 



I shall eat gamy things and drink bubbly 
things, and accumulate indigestion, arteriosclero- 
sis, and headaches. Let the workingmen have 
vulgar health. Me for the purple pangs of plu- 
tocracy — what ? 

But first of all I shall buy me a flea. I must 
have a flea, and a bigger and fiercer one than 
Rothschild's. I think I shall go in for hippo- 
potamus fleas. 

Then I shall get me a couple of stamps. I shall 
visit the Ahkoond of Swat or Mr. Villa of Mexico 
and have printed a special edition of two heathen 
stamps, just for me, for which I shall pay $20,- 
000 apiece, and turn all philatelists greener and 
purpler with envy than my stamps. 

Then I shall hire a man to go up and down 
Europe and explore all the ragbags of royalty, 
and buy up the debts of all the bankrupt dukes, 
and ship me home nine carloads of Old Masters, 
eight tons of Louis Quinze and Pre-Raphaelite 
and European Elbert Hubbard furniture, seventy- 
seven wagon-loads of china and glassware, thirty 
bales of moth-eaten tapestry, six cords of canes, 
sixteen hogsheads of old armor, swords, 'and 
blunderbusses, a hundred gallons of ancient coins 
with green on them (specially manufactured in 
Florence and Rome), besides a collection of col- 
lars and cuffs, boots and buttons, napkin rings, 
crowns, and sceptres from the various kings, 
queens, and knaves of the Old World. 

I will have an oflice into which you can enter 
210 



only by passing four rooms and five secretaries, 
and never allow any one at all to come and se6 
me; and I shall live in a house in the middle of 
a hundred-acre woods-pasture, with two men at 
the gate with shotguns. 

It sure will be nice to be rich. When I get 
lonesome I will go and play with my flea. 



211 



SHALL SHE TELL HIM? ^ 

A MOST Interesting letter comes to me from a 
reader. She writes: 

"I am nearly thirty. Some years ago I for- 
got, for a brief time, that I was a woman, and 
being unhappy, restless, and extremely foolish, I 
lowered myself to sin. I did not fall utterly, but 
In my Indiscretion I stained my soul. 

"After a short period my conscience awakened. 
I saw where I was going, and I stopped. I re- 
pented bitterly of my acts and thoughts. I asked 
forgiveness of Heaven, and thought that It had 
been granted. 

"I did not think when I committed those sins 
that love would ever come to accuse me. But 
to-day I love a man, and he loves me with all his 
heart. He believes me to be all that a woman 
should be. If I tell him the facts of my past 
life I know he will hate me. 

"Yet I feel that I do not deserve his love, and 
that I Ought not to marry him and deceive him, 
as I would deceive him if I remain silent. 

"What shall I do? Shall I tell him? 

"I had thought repentance and right living 
would wipe out any sin, however great, but I can 

212 



find no peace since love has come, and I stand 
accused before it. 

"Do I deserve love? Or must I give him up, 
and put love away from me forever because of 
those early mistakes of mine? 

"I know, and he has not tried to conceal it 
from me, that his life has not been blameless. 
But somehow it seems different in a woman. 

"Shall I tell him?" 

The "unpardonable sin" nonsense has done no 
end of hurt. It is not wrongdoing that perma- 
nently soils; it is continuance in it, and the per- 
sistent love of it. If you are honestly sorry that 
you did wrong, and not merely fearful that you 
will be found out, and if you have ceased evil- 
doing, you have a moral right to respect your- 
self. 

The "bird with a broken wing" theory Is im- 
moral. We have all sinned, the Good Book tells 
us; and, for that matter, we do not need to be 
told; we know it. And it is the very essence 
of any right living to be able, by repentance and 
reformation, to take up life afresh, "with a con- 
science void of offense toward God and man." 

As for your husband, or husband to be, he is 
not your confessor. You are your own judge 
as to your fitness for wifehood. You know 
whether you come to him worthily or not. And 
if he Is not satisfied to take you as you are, and 
upon your own estimate of yourself, you would 
better let him go. 

213 



Hold on to common sense. Be just to your- 
self, or you cannot be just to others. It is very 
easy to fall into the luxury of self-condemnation, 
to wallow in remorse; but a diseased, morbid, 
and unintelligent conscience can do quite as much 
harm as no conscience at all. 

Keep your chin up. Tell the truth in prefer- 
ence to a lie, but remember there are times when 
our highest duty is to keep our mouth shut. 

To believe that you are forever ruined and 
hopeless is about the worst belief you can indulge 
in. And rest assured if you are now sure in 
your own heart that you have put away forever 
the follies of the past, love can and will come 
and keep you sound and clean in the future. 

Old as human sin is human and divine forgive- 
ness, and old as the blackness of weakness and 
perversion is the whiteness of the new life built 
upon the death of the old. Says Whittier: 

For still the new transcends the old 
In signs and tokens manifold; 
Slaves rise up men; the olive waves, 
With roots deep set in battle graves. 



214 



THE UNDYING CREDULITIES 

"Superstition," says Lippert, "has a tenacity 
of life which no religion possesses." 

In the second part of his "Christentum, Volks- 
glaube und Volksbrauch" there is an interesting 
list of pre-Christian superstitions still prevalent 
in Europe. 

Almost all of our Christmas customs are sur- 
vivals of heathendom, though made beautiful by 
the spirit of the Christ-Child. 

The religious feeling is the property of cer- 
tain minds, of a limited number, even among 
church folk; but superstitions are in every mind. 
Some people are religious; all people are super- 
stitious. 

They have changed religions several times in 
England; they still retain the old Druid fancies. 
Long after old faiths lose their power old credu- 
lities hold their grip. When the gods fled from 
Greece they settled in the backwoods of Christen- 
dom. They ceased to be respectable and adored; 
they became bush-whackers and feared. 

The Venus that inspired Praxiteles became the 
Venus that lived in the mountain and lured Tann- 
hauser to his ruin. 

215 



The religions of India are dead; the folk-lore 
of India is still alive. 

What is preached in temples varies with time ; 
what is told to children by mothers at bedtime is 
fixed and eternal. 

The theses of theologians in one century are 
obsolete in the next century; but Little Red Rid- 
inghood and Jack the Giant Killer are as fresh 
with youth and interest now in the nursery as 
they ever were. 

Bluebeard will outlive Napoleon; and the Old 
Woman that Lived in a Shoe has a dynasty of 
fame beyond that of Queen Victoria. 

When beliefs disappear from the consciousness 
of the race they sink into the subconsciousness. 
The visible river of faith becomes subterranean 
streams of credulity. 

The high priests that ruled Egypt are no more ; 
the prophets of Israel have ceased; the medieval 
monks and hermits have gone; the echoes of Lu- 
ther and Loyola, Calvin, John Knox, and Wesley 
grow fainter; new preachers, new gospels, new 
moral programmes appear; but the clairvoyants, 
palmists, fortune-tellers, astrologers, table-rap- 
pers, and all the tribe of hocus-pocus are doing 
as lively a business, and by the same methods, in 
New York, London, and Paris as they ever did 
in Samarcand and Hellopolls, Palmyra, and Baby- 
lon. 

Religion Is progressive development and adapts 
itself to the development of the Intellect. Super- 

3i6 



stition is the immovable orthodoxy, that adapts 
itself to nothing, reigning forever in its pristine 
shapes. 

They that play at the Stock Exchange and the 
horse-race and the poker game are too advanced 
to go to church; but they believe in luck, wear 
charms, and are afraid of Friday the thirteenth, 
precisely as the men of Nineveh. They are the 
truly orthodox. 



217 



THE UNBELIEVER 

"As sure as the sun rises," said the Believer. 

"That," replied the Unbeliever, "is not sure 
at all." 

Believer — What do you mean? Would you 
dispute the sun? 

Unbeliever — Certainly! Why not? The sun- 
rise is only one of those things everybody takes 
for granted. You have perhaps seen it a half 
dozen times. From that you reason that it takes 
place every day. But I doubt if the sun rises 
when there is no one present to see it. Would 
a theatrical company go on with a performance 
if every seat in the house were empty? 

Believer — You are crazy. 

Unbeliever — Rational, you mean. The proba- 
bility is that this sunrise business is just another 
scheme of hotel proprietors of mountain resorts, 
of farmers who want their farmhands to get up 
early, and of other interested people. Whenever 
you find a permanent institution which imposes 
upon the whole of mankind you will find graft 
behind it. 

Believer — ^What a charming belief I 

Unbeliever — Don't accuse me of belief ! I hate 

2i8 



the word. I have only unbelief. That alone is 
consistent with high mentality. It is the dupes of 
the world who believe. It is the sharpers of the 
world who live upon beliefs. 

Believer — ^Yes? 

Unbeliever — Sure ! If there were no confidence 
there could be no confidence men. If there were 
no trust there could be no heartbreaks. If there 
were no assurance there could be no disappoint- 
ment. 

Believer — But, man, you know the sun rises 
every day, and will rise to-morrow. 

Unbeliever — Nothing of the kind I When I 
see it rise, I know it rises. When I don't see it, 
I do not know. I refuse to take other people's 
word. And how do you know the sun will come 
up to-morrow? Simply because you saw it to-day 
and yesterday. But because a thing has happened 
twice or three times or a million times, is that 
any proof it will go on happening? I took Christ- 
abel out to dinner last night and the night before ; 
do I have to go on taking her out to dinner for- 
ever? 

Believer — Good! You have convinced me. I 
shall begin by doubting the things that make me 
unhappy. First, I shall doubt the cocksureness 
of my own reason. That will land me in a com- 
fortable confidence in my Instincts. Then I shall 
register a doubt against that fixed belief of yours 
in the evil of all men and the cussedness of things 
in general. By that I shall bounce back again 

219 



into my old faith in good men and my trust that 
all things work out for the best. I shall doubt 
the frailty of women and so come again to my 
belief in virtue. I shall doubt doubt, and hence 
have faith in faith. 

Unbeliever — But 

Believer — But me no buts! If I am to be a 
doubter I am going the whole hog. 

Unbeliever — ^Amazing ! 

Believer — Not at all. Rational! Superra- 
tional! 



220 



WHEN THE WORLD WOKE UP 

John Fiske calls the thirteenth century "the 
glorious century." In H. L. Chamberlain's re- 
cent volume Is a list of some of the wonders of 
that time. I condense them here, to give the 
reader a bird's-eye view of that century, in which 
the world woke up. 

In Europe the Hansa and Rhenish Alliance of 
Cities was formed, "paving the way," says Ranke, 
"for civic liberty and the formation of powerful 
states." 

The Magna Charta was proclaimed in England 
in 1 2 15, "a solemn proclamation of the inviola- 
bility of the great principle of personal freedom 
and personal security." 

During this century the slave trade disap- 
peared from European countries (except Spain). 

Money begins to take the place of barter in 
buying and selling; the foundation of modern 
business is laid. 

Paper is first manufactured, "the most momen- 
tous industrial achievement till the invention of 
the locomotive." 

The religious awakening under Francis of As- 
slsi occurred. Thode says: "This movement 

221 



gives men the first forewarning of universal free- 
dom of thought." 

Scholars like Albertus Magnus and Roger Ba- 
con prepared the ground for modern natural sci- 
ence by turning the attention of men from logical 
disputes to mathematics, physics, astronomy, and 
chemistry. 

"A new era in mathematical science began," 
says Cantor; this was especially the work of Leo- 
nardo of Pisa, who was the first to introduce to 
Europe the Indian (falsely called Arabian) nu- 
merical signs; also Jordanus Saxo, who initiated 
us into the art of algebraic calculation (also origi- 
nally invented by the Hindoos). 

The first dissection of a human body took place 
at the close of this century. 

Dante lived in the thirteenth century. 

Adam de la Halle, born in 1240, was the first 
master of note in the treatment of counterpoint, 
so that with him modern music in a strict sense 
begins. Gevaert, the musical authority, writes: 
"Henceforward we must consider the thirteenth 
century, formerly so despised, as the beginner of 
all modern art." 

Giotto, Cimabue, and Niccolo Pisano were of 
the thirteenth century; and to them the world 
is indebted for a perfectly new art, that of mod- 
ern painting. 

Almost all the masterpieces of Gothic archi- 
tecture, "the incomparable beauty of which we 

222 



to-day admire, but cannot imitate," originated in 
this century. 

The first purely secular university, Bologna, 
was founded shortly before 1200. 

In the thirteenth century Marco Polo made his 
expeditions of discovery which laid the founda- 
tions of our knowledge of the earth's surface. 
This beginning of world geography is the germ 
that ripens into world-civilization and world-gov- 
ernment, which we are now commencing to grasp 
as an Ideal. 

But, most significant of all, it was in the thir- 
teenth century that the long and horrid darkness 
that had closed upon men's minds began to lift. 

The western world ceased to sleep and to 
dream and began to awaken, to live, to do. 

"Men, so to speak, turned a corner in their 
course, the past vanished from their sight, hence- 
forth they belong to the future." 

The declaration of the Magna Charta sounds 
as a trumpet blast for all modern morals, a sen- 
timent not yet realized, but understood and 
toward which we aim : 

"No one may be condemned except in accord- 
ance with the laws of the land. Right and jus- 
tice may not be bought nor refused." 

Since June 15, 12 15, when this decree went 
forth, it has become a law above all laws; sen- 
ates and kings must bow to it. 



223' 



THE UNKNOWN FUTURE 

A GIRL went to a physician, who felt of her 
pulse, peeked into her eye, listened to her heart 
action, and announced that she had no more than 
six years to live. 

At least, so it is presented in a recent Parisian 
play, and one critic proposed the query: "If you 
suddenly learned that you would die in six years, 
what would you do, and how would you pass the 
remainder of your allotted time?" 

We cannot think of this without depression. 
And this leads us to realize that one of the chief 
ingredients in the sum of our contentment is our 
ignorance of the future. 

The only reason why fortune tellers may be 
tolerated, together with gypsy seers, dealers in 
premonitions, and forewarners, is that they lie. 
If they tell the truth occasionally it is by acci- 
dent. 

The one thing we can never know, the eternally 
inscrutable region, is the future. 

A European astronomer, Jean Mascart, feels 
confident he can tell what the weather is going 
to be a month in advance. The old-fashioned 
almanac claimed even more, for it foretold 

224 



droughts and cold spells for the whole year. John 
Stuart Mill expressed the opinion that a science 
of the future might be created, indicating coming 
events by well known laws. 

But so far all efforts to peer ahead are not 
in anywise to be depended on. For which let 
us be thankful! 

What a calamity it would be if science should 
not only register the weather of next July, but 
the various happenings which are to come to us 
in the course of our existence, the disease which 
finally is to take us off, and even the date of our 
death I 

Imagine a poor wretch who from childhood 
should know exactly the experiences he is to go 
through, and should thus play his part in the 
drama of life carefully following an unescapable 
programme ! 

No more surprises, and they are the chief 
pleasures of life. 

No more mystery, and that is life's beauty. 

No more fancy and wonder about to-morrow, 
and thus to-day would be asph)rxiated. 

No more liberty, no more spirit of adventure, 
no gay meeting of the dawn with expectant heart. 

You couldn't even commit suicide, unless it 
were in the programme. 

No more courting and the delicious uncertainty 
as to her answer ; you would know that you would 
get her anyhow, or not; why flutter? 

The great tragedy, or comedy, of life is often 
225 



disappointing in the end, but at least it is mighty 
interesting as we go along, thanks to the blessed 
curtain that 

hides from us all the book of fate, 
All but the page prescribed, the present date. 

If the scientist should offer us a knowledge of 
the future we should tell him to go hang. Life is 
poky enough as it is ; at least leave us those graces 
of surprise, of mystery, and of adventure without 
which existence would be a bore twice cursed. 



226 



THE NEW NOBILITY 

There will always be a nobility and a com- 
mons. Democracy does not operate to level all 
people to one grade. It creates distinctions as 
sharp as those of the old world systems. There 
will be as great a difference between a noble and 
a vulgar person under democracy as there is be- 
tween a duke and a stable boy in the artificial 
class scheme of England. There will be more; 
for often in European society the real character 
of the stable boy is not far removed from that 
of the duke. 

In the real gradations of nobility rank is of 
no significance. A lady who is a leader in the 
smart set may be low and common, and the lady 
who runs the typewriter may be high and gentle. 

As a rule, extreme wealth which creates idle- 
ness produces vulgarity, causing narrowness, 
pride, and selfishness; and extreme poverty has 
the same effect, as it stunts, imbrutes and clogs 
life. Beyond this, one's circumstances mean lit- 
tle or nothing in cultural value. 

Real nobility may be known by these marks: 

A certain fine cleanliness of mind. An ignoring 
and an unconsciousness of the body and its ap- 

227 



petltes. Moderation in eating and drinking. Per- 
fect control over the sex instinct. The body must 
be got out of the way, else one always gives an 
impression of grossness that is offensive. 

Genuine humility of spirit. Not servility, but 
a noble indifference to praise and honors. To 
want high office, to want to be noticed, admired, 
and envied, is to be, to a degree, coarse natured. 

To push one's self, to advertise, to scheme for 
prominence, may be good business, but it is not 
noble. This does not apply to the advertisement 
of one's goods which he has for sale, but to one's 
self. 

All vanity, boasting, talking of self and of one's 
own achievements or money, a loud tone of voice, 
the habit of breaking in upon the conversation 
of others, too much prominence of the pronoun 
I, these are low. 

The real nobility never dress strikingly. The 
woman who wears a garment that attracts atten- 
tion because of its startlingness shows a streak of 
commonness. The height of good dressing is to 
be unobserved, said Beau Brummel. 

A fondness for jewelry and perfumes is a mark 
of a lack of refinement. 

Real nobleness is indicated by a taste for sim- 
plicity, a quietness in speech, in manner, in one's 
furniture and house. All display, whether in a 
Fifth avenue mansion or a Bowery necktie, is 
coarse. 

Luxury is an unfailing mark of a low nature, 
228 



particularly when it is accompanied by extrava- 
gance and debts. 

The noble mind respects itself, and will not be 
imposed upon. It is unafraid, but not bullying. 

Nobleness is shown by courtesy, by an unfailing 
regard for the feelings of others, by an inborn 
gentleness and modesty; just as coarseness of na- 
ture is shown by the opposite kind of thing. 

Testing yourself and others by these standards, 
you will be surprised at the number of genuinely 
noble people you know. You find them every- 
where; one may be selling newspapers at the 
street comer, one may work in your kitchen, one 
may be a millionaire, one a poor man. 

The most striking presentation I have ever 
seen of the kind of an aristocrat democracy 
stands for is in Forbes-Robertson's "Passing of 
the Third Floor Back." 



229 



WORD PICTURES 

Try to realize words, especially the strong, 
vital words. 

One way to do this is to create by your im- 
agination a picture that shall express the word. 
Make your own cinematograph show. Learn 
how to entertain yourself a little by your own 
fancy and you will not be so helpless — dependent 
upon other people and outside things for amuse- 
ment. 

Here are some hints. Start from them and 
create your own scenes. 

Strength. A strong man ploughing. His 
face is ruddy, smiling, vigorous. His hair is 
crisp, his eyes blue and clear. Sleeves uprolled 
and collar downturned display his healthy skin. 
He is pausing for a moment's rest, his hand upon 
the plough. His two huge Norman horses stand, 
deep breathing, ready, docile. Watch that man 
work. 

Power. You stand at a little way station In 
the country. The lightning express goes by. You 
hear its owl-like hoot in the distance, see its head- 
light miles away as a dim star; It approaches, 
whirls past with crash and shriek as of a thou- 

230 



sand giants. There is a blur of light, there are 
streams of Sparks, a whirlwind of smoke, and it 
Is gone; soon you hear its owl-hoot again in the 
distance. Power I 

Dominion. A big, helpful word, to get one's 
soul out of the swamps of pettiness. See Gibral- 
tar, huge, impregnable, cannon-pierced, dominat- 
ing all about. 

Peace. A summer lake. Sheep asleep in a 
meadow. Motionless trees. A soft half-moon 
silvering all with a veil of mystery. A house, 
dark, with drawn blinds. 

Wisdom. Recall Michael Angelo's "Moses." 
Let this statute rise before you, massive, majes- 
tical. Wonder what those lips might say if, as 
the artist once commanded, it should "speak." 

Hope. Dawn. A rising sun, just peep,5ng 
above the hill. Apple blossoms budding. Fuzzy 
little chickens running about. The red cock crow- 
ing. A young girl dressed in white standing at 
the open door of a cottage, her eyes smiling. 

And Jocund day 
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops. 

Faith. A long wedge-line of wild geese flying 
northward on a spring night. You hear their 
honk-honk dropping from the vague dimness 
above. A sailing boat drawing toward port, yet 
out of sight of land; a pilot with his eye on the 
compass and his hand upon the wheel. A farmer 

231 



planting seed, covering them up, and going away. 

Strength, power, dominion, peace, wisdom, 
hope, faith. 

Let us get the habit of thinking these things, 
of picturing them. 

It wad frae monie a blunder free us, 
And foolish notion. 



232 



\ 



DANCING 

Dancing Is the oldest art in the world. 

It is the primeval form of self-expression. 

It is peculiarly the form In which youth shows 
forth Its joy. When grandfather Is pleased he 
smiles. When the boy of six is pleased he jumps 
up and down, spins about and capers; I. e., dances. 

The little lambs leap up, the calves caper, the 
colts kick and race, the kitten chases its tail, and 
the puppies Indulge In the most twisted antics, 
all to express their joy in life. 

Of human creatures the same Is true. Dancing 
Is as natural as singing. It is the first and most 
satisfactory outlet for the spirit of play. 

Is dancing Immoral? 

Morality consists not in the doing or not doing 
of this or that. It consists in such a moderate, 
decent, and Intelligent Indulgence In any form of 
pleasure as shall Indicate that one is "above his 
pleasures," always has due regard for the es- 
teem of his world, and never makes his amuse- 
ment the vehicle for his vices. 

One can dance, therefore, quite as morally, as 
temperately, and self-respectingly as he can dine 
or sleigh ride. 

233 



Dancing is no more moral or immoral than 
pussy-wants-a-corner or drop-the-handkerchief. 

It is not the thunders of the Puritanic moralist 
that dancing needs; it is the spirit of the gentle- 
man and gentlewoman. 

Within the last few years dancing has advanced 
into an amazing vogue. The so-called "new 
dances" are such that elderly people can partici- 
pate in them, as they are simpler and more readily 
learned than the waltzes, schottisches, and polkas 
of a former day. 

The result has been that instead of sitting 
about all evening after dinner, smoking, drinking, 
and playing cards, the older persons arise and 
shake their legs even as the youth. 

Of course there Is danger in dancing. There 
is danger In every kind of self-expression in joy. 
But the morals of the American people are not 
going to be corrupted. 

The intelligence, good sense, and self-restraint 
of decent people can be trusted. And If not, then 
no amount of police control and moral admoni- 
tion will do them any good. 

Whatever induces the people to play more and 
drink and lounge less is helpful. And dancing 
is the original play. It is the first impulse of a 
happy heart In a sound body. 

Instead of abolishing dancing in restaurants, 
we ought to teach it in the public schools. 



234 



THE POND OF VANOISE 

At Romille, near Fougeres, In France, there is 
a pretty pond, the pond of the Vanoise it is called. 

From twenty leagues around they used to come 
there to drown themselves, says the Paris Figaro. 
The pond of the Vanoise attracted the candidates 
for suicide, as if its placid waters exercised an 
evil spell. In vain the place was watched. Every 
day or so a body was found. 

The inhabitants of Romille, calm Bretons who 
love life, strongly disaplproved of this use of 
their pond as an extinguisher of vital sparks. 
They had a meeting, they passed resolutions, they 
made a motion and took a vote. It was carried. 
On the banks of the pool they put up signs: 

"Defense de se noyer sous peine d'amende." 
Which may be translated, "Drowning one's self 
is prohibited under penalty of law." 

And the beauty of it is that, since these pla- 
cards have been placed, no one has dared drown 
himself in the pond of the Vanoise. 

The simplicity and effectiveness of this plan 
commend it as suitable for universal adoption. 
At one Alexandrian stroke any civic or social Gor- 
dian knot may be loosed. 



Are we tired of political bosses, lobbyists, and 
corruptlonists ? Simply pass a law that such per- 
sons be hereby forbidden to practise their arts 
and are ordered to go to farming. 

Why trifle longer with burglary, arson, and 
murder? Be it resolved that such offenses be 
from now on prohibited. And there you are. It 
is like Columbus and the egg. So simple you 
never thought of it. 

Are we aweary of the strife of opinion? Let us 
legislate that all people shall, beginning the first 
of January, be required to think as we think. 
Then shall we lapse Into summer calm and none 
shall any more argue. 

Why be offended further by the drinking of 
alcoholic liquor, by the use of tobacco, by the 
end-seat hog, by the slit skirt, by the X-ray robe, 
by peroxide hair, by crowded street cars, by de- 
layed railway trains, by political parties that do 
not fulfil their pledges, by gum-chewing and bad 
grammar? 

Let the legislature or city council simply print 
a number of placards and insert properly paid 
notices in the newspapers. 

"Defense to do any of these things sous peine 
d'amende." 

Just a simple twist of the wrist. The millen-. 
nium is right here in a minute. 



236 



A WONDERFUL SINNER 

You have doubtless read that recent story of 
the woman who lived for seven years in the 
back ofSce of a lawyer because she loved him 
and could only love him unlawfully; lived in her 
mean quarters as a prisoner in a cell, just to be 
near him, foregoing all the world for him, until 
one day he died suddenly in her arms, and all 
their secret joy perished In a moment of shame 
and death. 

This news item lay like a red splash across the 
page. Among the other news, all of sordid in- 
terest, political self-seeking, the snarl of money- 
monsters, the yelp of taken criminals, the ges- 
tures of despair, the preening of society, the vani- 
ties of kings, the rumors of war, the long roll of 
accidents, among all this mud of the ordinary 
bloomed one morning this story of purple pas- 
sion, through the coarse clay of events swept this 
sudden fire of unbelievable love. 

I am not going to praise this woman, lest the 
army of the righteous sweep down on me, lest all 
the holy hands of those whose secret sins have 
never bloomed In public be raised to condemn me 
as a corrupter of public morals. 

237 



If they say her sin is great, and that her ex- 
ample is evil and in nowise to be commended or 
followed, and that it is all a disgraceful, pitiable 
tale, and one to be suppressed, hushed, and turned 
away from, and inimical to morals, I have nothing 
to answer, I cannot defend her. 

The woman was a sinner. But I, for one, take 
off my hat and stand bowed with a great awe 
before her, for her sin was a love so mighty and 
strange and unbelievable that beside it most of 
the comfortable righteousness of the world looks 
shrunken and little. 

When I think of those long days of loneliness 
gladly spent for a few words of affection, of those 
Intolerable convict hours borne with transfigur- 
ing loyalty for the sake of being near the man 
she adored, I seem to be in the presence of the 
elemental woman heart, majestic as the high 
mountains, awful as Niagara or the roar of the 
storm-driven ocean. 

She loved. Where in the pages of romance 
is to be found such love! Before it our smug 
conventions are shattered, our nice respectabili- 
ties are shrivelled away, our bitter words of con- 
demnation dry upon our lips, and we go out from 
where she and her Judge stand face to face, as 
the Pharisees went out from the presence of the 
Master and the wayward woman when He said: 
"Neither do I condemn thee. Go and sin no 
more." 

To how many who have read her story has 
238 



there come an amazing revelation of the depth, 
the height, the length, the breadth of that most 
abysmal of things, a woman's heart I And how 
many of us, while we talked lightly and care- 
fully of the scandal of it, and said, "It was too 
bad," have felt in our hearts shamed and be- 
littled, for that we knew that in us was capability 
of no such greatness, such towering self-sacrifice, 
no, not even in sin. For even in our sins we are 
so petty! 



239 



MANDRAKES AND MODERNISM 

There is a vast deal of the world's learning 
that is pure waste. 

I have seen libraries in Europe, books of 
precious vellum, hand printed, many of them by 
the lifetime labor of anchorites, and not one of 
them containing an ounce of wisdom useful to- 
day. 

Many of our public and private book collec- 
tions at the present time are for the most part 
junk heaps. 

The worship of books has become a blind cult. 
We esteem any aggregation of bound volumes a 
mark of learning. 

As a matter of fact, perhaps nine-tenths of the 
knowledge men accumulated up to a hundred 
years ago is useless, except to show how much is 
not worth while. 

As a sample of the amazing non-facts men 
swallowed whole on the word of savants, take the 
literature of the mandrake. 

This plant, the mandragora officinalis of the 
Mediterranean region, was from the most ancient 
times endowed by superstition with strange 
powers. Read the story of Leah's mandrakes in 
the thirtieth chapter of Genesis. 

240 



The reason for the crazy beliefs that attached 
themselves to this plant was doubtless the shape 
of its root, which is forked and crudely resembles 
human legs. The upper part is not unlike a man's 
body, and with a little skill one can cut the top 
to look like a head, while if grains are imbedded 
In the crown they will sprout and give a fair imi- 
tation of hair. 

Here are some of the "facts" : 

The mandrake can be used as the basis of a love 
philter. It will also cure childlessness. 

When pulled from the ground it utters a hu- 
man cry, as in Longfellow's "Spanish Student" : 

Teach me where that wondrous mandrake grows, 
Whose magic root, torn from the earth with groans 
At midnight hour, can scare the fiends away 
And make the mind prolific in its fancies. 

To uproot a mandrake was dangerous business. 
Pliny advised first drawing three concentric cir- 
cles around it with a sword. Theophrastus rec- 
ommended jumping three times around it. The 
approved method in the middle ages was to tie 
a hungry dog to the plant and offer him a piece 
of meat; he gives a lunge, and there you are! 
No one hurt with a curse except a dog. 

Greek, Latin, and Arabic literature abound in 
mandrake information. The plant was an inter- 
mediate creation between the vegetable and ani- 
mal kingdoms, as the ape comes between animal 
and man. 

241 



The mandrake is part demon in its powers, 
part plant in nature, and part human in form. 

It doubles the treasure of those who own It. 

It knows the future. Ask it a question and it 
shakes Its head. 

Boccaccio and Machlavelli, La Fontaine and 
Caliban make use of It In drama and story. 

The best mandrakes are those pulled under a 
gibbet where hangs a fresh corpse. 

Mandrake leaves shine like stars. 

All this may serve to show the method of minds 
before the modern era. 

People did not want to know what was true, 
but what was interesting. 

Historical truth Is a modern discovery. Sci- 
entific truth had no particular value up to a few 
generations ago. 

People then were children, with all a child's 
credulity, a fact no book has brought out so vivid- 
ly as Mark Twain's "A Yankee at King Arthur's 
Court." 

The tendency to-day Is to accept learned men's 
statements for nothing, except they be proved. 
No authority goes. The most famous scientist 
In the world would be laughed at if he wrote a 
book of assertions without facts to back them up. 

Furthermore, the learned are learning that 
their sayings have little weight unless they can 
strip them of long words and technical terms and 
put them into plain English, understandable of 
the people. 

242 



The wonderful eighteenth and nineteenth cen- 
turies saw more than the downfall of the irra- 
tional tyranny in government; they saw the be- 
ginning of the downfall of all humbug authority 
in every realm of thought — the first step in the 
emancipation of mankind. 



243 



NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS 

The New Year is here. It is inventory time. 
Let us look over the stock of habits, ideas, and 
relationships we have accumulated the past twelve 
months and clean up. 

The New Year's resolution is a good thing. 
Why drift along, the slave and plaything of our 
unmanaged desires and of our accidental circum- 
stances? Why not be our own master and live 
one year like an intelligent human being? 

Examine your habits. Lop off the bad ones. 
Free yourself from any ways you have fallen 
Into that make you lazy, unhealthy, miserable, 
and disagreeable to other people. 

Determine this year to be master of self; that 
you will control your thoughts, regulate your pas- 
sions, and guide your own deeds; that you will 
not let events lead you by the nose. 

Resolve to be happy. Remember Lincoln's 
saying that "folks are usually about as happy as 
they make up their minds to be." 

This year you shall not neglect your friends. 
They are too valuable, as life assets, to lose. 

You will adopt some system and stick to it, 
knowing that nine-tenths of our irritation comes 
from lack of system. 

244 



Lay out a course of study. No one Is too old 
to learn. Resolve to give some time each day 
to reading some helpful book. Cut out the trash. 

Resolve to keep an account of all the money 
you get and of all you spend. You may have 
tried this many times and failed. Never mind; 
you are still alive and have the chance to try it 
again. 

Save. Put a certain fraction by of all you 
make. There's no friend like money in the bank. 

Don't spend any money till you get it. Don't 
go into debt. Beware of buying all those things 
you "must have," for you mustn't have anything 
until you can pay for it. 

No alcohol this year. Let your body rest 365 
days from this poison and see how you feel. 
Don't get into a moral fever over this. Don't 
"try" not to drink. Just don't drink. 

Resolve to take that daily exercise. 

Eliminate worry. This year make up your 
mind to fret over nothing. Adjust yourself to 
facts instead of getting into a stew over them. 
If a matter can be helped, help it; if it cannot be 
helped, forget it. 

This year resolve to keep discord out of the 
house. Nobody can quarrel with you if you do 
not quarrel with him. Say to yourself that you 
will not once in 19 16 speak crossly to your chil- 
dren; that you will not say one unkind word to 
your husband or wife, and that you will keep 
agreeable if it takes a leg. 

245 



This may be the last year you will have. Make 
it a good one. 

You know how you ought to live. At least, 
you think you do. And if you do as well as your 
own judgment tells you, it will be an advance. 

This is old-fashioned advice. But happiness is 
old-fashioned, and life. There is no new-fan- 
gled way to be content. 

And learn this of wise Marcus Aurelius: 

"To change thy mind and follow him that sets 
thee right is to be none the less the free agent 
that thou wast before." 

Also : "The happiness and unhappiness of the 
rational social animal depends not on what he 
feels but on what he does; just as virtue and vice 
consist not in feeling but in doing." 



246 



AN OPEN LETTER TO SANTA CLAUS 

My dear Santa Claus : I am writing to you 
in behalf of the several millions of people in this 
country who are orthodox. 

By orthodox I mean those who believe in you. 
We also believe in fairies and angels. We be- 
lieve that the spirits of dead mothers still are 
near to all little boys and girls, and love them 
always, and look after them, and often put good 
thoughts into their minds, and kiss them in their 
sleep. And that fathers who are dead are living 
yet and loving their children and working for 
them somewhere. 

We believe in you, dear Santa Claus, because 
you do not do anything else but come around once 
a year and make children happy. Surely anybody 
who is in that business ought to be believed in, 
whether he exists or not. 

But you do exist. You live In the hearts and 
fancies of thousands and thousands of little peo- 
ple, and surely that is a much better place to 
live than in a big house in a fine city. 

So, when you come dashing along with your 
reindeer and your sledful of toys on Christmas 
Eve, don't forget that many, many eager eyes are 

247 



upon you and a vast number of little hearts are 
fluttering in tune and time with your sleighbells. 

Our stockings will be hung up, as usual, around 
the fireplace. If we haven't a fireplace you can 
find them hung up on the radiator or the back of 
a chair. For we know that people who build 
houses without fireplaces cannot fool you, and 
that you can come down the steam pipe or creep 
in through the keyhole just as easily as you used 
to enter houses by chimneys. 

Please don't bring us useful presents, like mit- 
tens and handkerchiefs. We want red wagons 
and dolls, and all sorts of those funny and Christ- 
masy thingumajigs that you know so well how to 
make. Also please bring some striped stick candy, 
because we can suck it a long time and it doesn't 
give us the stomach ache. 

If you see a very tiny stocking hanging among 
the others, don't overlook It. That's the baby's. 
He is not old enough, of course, to know what 
Christmas means, but go on, put something in his 
stocking anyhow, because we don't want him left 
out. Please do this. 

And don't forget grandma's stocking. She 
doesn't want to hang It up, but we are going to 
make her, because she is the very sweetest, dar- 
llngest grandma in all the whole world, and she 
believes in you, and has told us lots about you. 
Haven't you any grandma toys? 

We are all going to bed early and sleep tight 
as tight can be on Christmas Eve, and we prom- 

248 



ise honestly not to look, and we will be up early 
Christmas morning; so be sure and come. 

And please, please don't forget the poor chil- 
dren. You know it takes only the cheapest kind 
of a toy to make them happy, to make them know 
that Christmas is really and truly here. 

So come, dear old Santa Claus, come to the 
myriad children who adore you, to the mother 
hearts that live again their childhood days when 
you visit them, to the fathers who, when they 
hear you coming, are changed "and become as lit- 
tle children," and even to all those whose babies 
are no more about them, but are gone to live 
with the blessed dead. 

We need you; and this world would be poorer 
and so waste and sad if you and the fairies and 
the angels should lose faith in us and come no 
more. 

P. S. — Last night little Tim, when he was say- 
ing his prayers, said "God bless Santa Claus, 
too." So you see there's one little fellow in this 
house that thinks you're all right. 



249 



SHAKESPEARE 

Back to Shakespeare! 

Study him in your youth, and in your old age 
he will come back to comfort you. 

If you would be a writer, learn from him how 
grandeur of thought can flow in a limpid style, 
and how an exquisite judgment can choose the one 
word wherein trembles the essence of conviction. 

If you would speak in public, let him be your 
master in that combined conciseness and eloquence 
that warms men's hearts while it persuades their 
minds. 

If you would know human nature and grasp 
the art of living, make familiar friends of his 
characters, high and low, mean and noble, and 
you shall come into that universality of experi- 
ence no man than he has better set forth. 

Of all Time's figures he appears the most 
amazing. The empires of Napoleon and Charle- 
magne have dissolved. The books of poets, es- 
sayists, and novelists who have been acclaimed 
by the people as Immortal have stood awhile, 
and at last have fallen from their pedestals, but 
Shakespeare remains, polished and perfect, the 
admiration of present day intelligence as much 
as when Ben Jonson sang his praise. 

He has been attacked and derided, his flaws 
have been pointed out. His very existence has 

250 



been denied. But all the waves of criticism have 
beaten in vain upon the edifice of his fame. He 
remains to-day the greatest master of the greatest 
language of history. There is no other author 
where you can find English in its ideal perfection. 

He is a true master of men. As has been said: 
"What king has he not taught state? What 
maiden has not found him finer than her deli- 
cacy? What lover has he not outloved? What 
gentleman has he not instructed in the rudeness 
of his behavior?" 

Read your Shakespeare, young men and 
women ! If he bores you, it is for the same rea- 
son that the noble bores the low and narrow; 
read on, until you catch step with that majestical 
mind; read on, and find your littleness falling 
from you and your soul growing great ! 

And rest assured that it is a sad thing for us 
when we cannot have a whole-souled admiration 
for those real kings of men whom Time has test- 
ed and all mankind has crowned. 

Buy the small editions of his separate plays. 
Carry a little volume in your pocket. Pencil it. 
Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest. Read 
aloud his sounding phrases to another or to your- 
self. Commit to memory those lines which find 
you. 

The mind to whom Shakespeare is a constant 
companion cannot be entirely commonplace; for 
in Shakespeare is the soul of the English race 
at its best. 

251 



THE ANONYMOUS LETTER 

Lift up your hand right now and swear that 
never, so long as you live, and so help you God, 
will you write an anonymous letter, except it be 
a kind one. After which please kiss the Bible. 

If you hate anybody, either go and whip him, 
or else go away and let him alone. 

Don't stab him in the back, don't put poison in 
his tea, don't shoot him from behind a fence cor- 
ner, and, what is worse, because still more cow- 
ardly, don't write him an anonymous letter. 

The anonymous letter is the triumph of the 
petty. It is the victory of the impotent. It is 
the pride of the cowardly. 

The writer of such a letter is a copperhead 
snake, which differs from the gentlemanly rattle- 
snake in that it strikes without warning. 

An open, out and out enemy who loathes you 
heartily and says so is a wholesome person. He 
keeps you humble and makes you careful. But 
the man that smiles on you and goes home and 
writes you an anonymous letter is too low to be 
described here, on account of the postal laws. 

Of course you do not use profane language, 
which is naughty. But recall all the bad words 

252 



you ever heard, the unrepeatable vile epithets of 
all the languages you know, focus them upon one 
point — that is the anonymous letter writer. 

Don't hint. Don't insinuate. Insult if you 
must, but do it in plain English. And sign your 
name. 

Imitate the clerk, who was called to the boss's 
office. The boss said: 

"Mr. Brown, I understand you have been mak- 
ing insinuations about me." 

"Oh, no. That must be a mistake." 

"It is no mistake, Mr. Brown. I have it upon 
the best authority. Don't try to wriggle out 
of it." 

"But it must be a mistake. I never insinuate. 
To be sure, I said you were an old muttonhead 
and a rascal, but I never insinuated anything." 

By common consent, since the world was built, 
and men began the great game of fighting each 
other for gold, for woman, and for nothing at 
all, the sneak, the spy, and the traitor have been 
blackballed from the society of brave men. Away 
down below sneak, spy, and traitor in the list 
of human detestables may be found the man or 
woman who enjoys sending an anonymous letter. 

If you are full of venom and must get it out 
of your system write — write fully and foully. 
Then burn your letter. Thus it may relieve your- 
self and hurt no one. 



253 



GOLDEN ROD 

It has come, the army with golden plumes, 
and conquered the land. 

Every wall Is held, every highway is senti- 
nelled. There are squadrons in the meadows and 
pickets in the woods. 

So quietly the little soldiers came, myriads upon 
myriads of them, stealing northward by moon- 
light, spreading east and west guided by the winds 
and piped to by the birds in the hedgerows, so 
gently were we beleaguered, that until but a few 
days ago we knew it not, and then when we 
strolled far out one Sunday In the countryside we 
saw them, sheen of pure gold In the sun, nodding 
clusters of the most beautiful royal yellow in the 
world, happy groups laughing to us from the way- 
side, until we were all atremble with the exquisite- 
ness, the daintiness, the consummate wonder of It 
all, and "or ever I was aware my soul made me 
like the chariots of the Aminadab." 

There are other flowers for other spirit moods, 
for other seasons. We must love the little crocus, 
first born of the sun and the woman-earth, as it 
thrusts its fragile beauty up through the snow 
upon the warm side of the house; and the violet, 
shy beneath Its covering leaf, blue as a speck of 
,sky fallen timid and chaste; and the brilliant dan- 

-254 



delions, smearing the grass fields as with a brusK 
dipped In the sun; and the wild roses, like sweet 
thoughts of young girls gladdening the dusty 
road; and hollyhocks and marigold, pinks and for- 
get-me-nots, roses and rue; but what can compare 
with this gypsy flower of the open, this flower un- 
cultured and unimprovable by man, the direct gift 
and most gracious handiwork of God, the Master 
Craftsman of beauty, who lends the earth, at the 
death of summer, this garment of cloth-of-gold 
as a splendid cerement! 

Lovers love you, little Golden Rod. I saw 
them wandering in the woodland and along the 
lanes, gathering armfuls of your treasure. 

Mothers love you and set you In their windows 
to catch the sun. 

And I know a man (and how many are there, 
brothers of his spirit?) who goes out alone and 
looks at you these days, and finds your charm 
singing in his heart, a broken heart that seems 
to mend In your presence, for he thinks of her 
who last year walked beside him, as glorious in 
her eyes and smile as you are glorious, and who 
loved you so, and he takes the fullest and richest 
of your blooms, and lays them on the little mound 
where she sleeps forever. 

You too must go, Golden Rod, as all beauty 
must go, for evanescence Is writ on earthly joy. 
But would you might stay always with us, 
Clothing the palpable and familiar 
With golden exhalations of the dawn. 



